How do I reorganize this social media database for work?
December 4, 2020 1:54 PM   Subscribe

Are there any good out-of-the-box solutions (ideally web apps) that will help me organize our backlog of Instagram content? Not looking for a scheduling app like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck—more like a fusion of Dropbox/Google Sheets/Todoist—or at least that's how I'm imagining it.

I have:

A Dropbox drive with a few hundred social media images. Very inconsistently named and organized: some are IMG_XXXX.png, some are HEIC, some are named thematically, some are meant to be posted as a carousel all at once (some of these are in folders, some we indicate this with the filename).
A Google Sheet with photos listed in rough order of upload date, based on filename and/or description. Many but not all of these photos have captions listed alongside them. Some of the entries are links to folders on the aforementioned Dropbox drive. There's also a column to the left that I mark when I've "posted" something—i.e., I've added it to...
A Google Doc with the actual schedule on it. This moves around, gets updated pretty frequently. I take everything here and post it using Hootsuite or directly.

I look at this, and I think to myself, there has to be a better way!

What solutions can you think of to keep track of all this stuff? Some of it is clearly process-based (e.g. the erratic file naming conventions). But I'm wondering if there's a Dropbox-type solution that lets me incorporate the info from the Google Sheet and Google Doc, all with one app. Or maybe extensions that help everything play nicely with each other.
posted by miltthetank to Technology (3 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
At my agency we use monday.com as the task management hub, with line items for each post (past present and future). Each line item can host unlimited assets, and we use monday as the system of record for all of our content. This makes the filename more or less irrelevant, because we do all of our organization and searching based on the attributes of the post line item, not the image file itself.

If that's not relevant to you:

I would search for "digital asset management software" and see if any of those solutions (bynder or a competitor) meets your dropbox style needs. Sorry I don't have a specific recommendation, but a quick search of that term came up with 10-20 options that might be a good fit. Good luck!
posted by seemoorglass at 2:23 PM on December 4, 2020


I've used Trello for this - you can attach the photo/s directly to the card or as links to Google Drive/Dropbox (I think there are Power-ups in Trello for both options but you don't need them). You can use labels to search and sort your photos, and dates to schedule.
posted by Wantok at 6:01 PM on December 4, 2020


I would look at Airtable to organize these assets - you can import a Google Sheet and it supports links and attachments. Because it's a database, you can sort, filter, and create different views, and embed it in a webpage to share it.

Airtable has a lot of standard and community templates, so you may find an example of someone who has already implemented what you want.
posted by alicat at 8:48 PM on December 5, 2020


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