Have photos, need system.

April 3, 2018 9:02 AM

I'm searching for a photo organization software that is 1. Shareable between many users on different computers, 2. Allows organization by user-created tags.

This software will be used to organize both stock photos and product images for a big creative team. We all use Mac. This software does NOT need to be free or even cheap.

Here is my dream workflow:
Myself and other members of my team add images to our database. When we add the images, we also add multiple relevant tags.
1. I'm looking for a stock image of a dad playing with his child (one that we have already purchased.) I can go into the program and search either "dad" or "child" or "boy" or "son" or "family" and come up with matching images.
2. I'm looking for an image of one of our products, let's call it "Doohickey." I search "Doohickey" in the program, and I see all the photographs that we have of "Doohickey." Another team member is searching for something to add to their design, but doesn't have a product in mind. So they search "lay flat" and see all the photographs we have added that are flat lay compositions.

Does anyone know of a product/software/program that functions like this?

Thanks in advance.

posted by ohsnapdragon to Technology (4 answers total)

I don't have any specific recommendations, but the general keywords for this kind of software is Digital Asset Management (DAM).
posted by rhizome at 9:18 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Among other things I do, I support a package called Extensis Portfolio for the Media Services group of a very large hospital. They use it to share digital assets between their team. I don't use the product myself, but I'm 99% sure it does what you want it to do. I do not know what they paid for it, or really much of anything about it. Knock on wood I'm not asked to do much in the way of support, so it appears to be stable.
posted by bondcliff at 9:20 AM on April 3, 2018

I imagine one of the hardest parts might be finding something that only does tagging and searching without a million other features clogging things up.
posted by rhizome at 10:15 AM on April 3, 2018

Best answer: I've done this before -- I had a couple of contracts to do image tagging for organizations that were setting up DAMs for internal use. These were the systems that they used :

Bynder
Asset Bank
Media Beacon

And a question you may not have considered -- do you have a something like a taxonomy that you'll be using, to structure and control the vocabulary your tags will be drawn from? Do you have mechanisms in place so that when a user searches for child, say, that the results include images tagged as girl and boy?
posted by spindle at 11:40 AM on April 3, 2018