Making sense of digital asset meta data

Making Sense of Digital Asset Meta Data

So you’ve researched all the digital asset management systems, you’ve found the tool that is just right for you and now you’re ready to get started and begin loading thousands of images. But WAIT! How will you know that your audience will be able to find what they are looking for? How will you know that you have all of the pertinent meta information associated to the media files? How are we assured that others will tag images with the correct data? After all, if thousands of images are loaded into a system and users can’t easily find what they are looking for then you’re not much better off than you were before you even had a system.

Look at the Audience

For starters, consider your audience. Who is going to be looking for media using your system. Are they retailers that need your product photos, are they sales people looking for presentation photos, are they designers looking for images to use in printed ads? If you start by putting yourself in the shoes of your intended audience(s) you can think thru how users will approach your system and what types of criteria that will be useful for them to filter images.

Streamlining the Process

Once you have defined the audience and understand HOW they will look for the images, look around for all possible sources that can be integrated together to build that meta data. For instance some images have image data directly embedded into the photos and file structure. Your photographer or stock photo provider may already have IPTC or other meta fields populated into the images. Perhaps you already have organized images in folders, named them with meaningful names. Perhaps there are other data sources in your company such as facility lists, product “item masters” that have related information that if brought together by a data guru could establish a rich resource of information to meet the meta data criteria.

Honeycomb Archive – Data Guru Included

Unfortunately, many photo sharing web sites and digital asset management systems approach meta data from the “author’s” perspective. The photographer can see what shutter speed, flash settings and other EXIF data pertaining to the photos. Honeycomb Archive can of course extract this information from your photos if desired, but does your audience really need this information? More likely they need a robust search mechanism that allows them to filter on keywords that are pertinent to how they will use the photos. If they are looking for photos of people they’ll want to search on criteria that filters people – gender, age, activity, etc. If they are searching for product photos they’ll want to search on item number, style, color, still shot or product in use. Honeycomb Archive makes sense of the meta data from a real world perspective and is completely configurable to tailor search filters for your audience. These tailored meta data tags are then easily assigned to new media with the option to assign meta data to multiple images at once or individually. We also provide the data guru services to combine other sources that may exist in your organization to reduce or eliminate data management time.