Managing Your Pictures
-Last year did a few photoshoots for the charity Shine Cancer Support.
The photos I took were of some one-day events that were running, one in London and the other in Southampton. The photos will be used to advertise similar events as well as for general publicity on printed and social media.
Cranefield, R (2024). Shine London Shakeup
I’m not the only photographer they use and they have run a lot of events over the years so their photography catalogue is pretty large but they had started to struggle with finding the right images and working with external web and marketing agencies. The time had come to see if there was a better way of organising images than the currenty solution of storing them all in a folder on Google Drive.
We all work in such a visual landscape that it is not unusual, even for small companies, to slowly acquire a large photo library. If you are a one-person-band then storing those photos in Apple or Google photos is probably sufficient, but as soon as you want to share those images amoungst a small staff, or with external designers those personal apps end up feeling quite limited.
To help Shine I looked into a number of Photo Management solutions to see what might work…
Photoshelter
www.photoshelter.com
The features on Photoshelter look great as it seems to have all the elements you’d want for a small to medium business: the ability to share photos with specific users internally; to give access to external suppliers like web designers and graphics teams; and to find the images you’re looking for.
This latter is a key part of any platform, if you can’t find the images you’re looking for you might as well not have them. many small organisations suffer from the loss of this key knowledge when people leave so a platform that can help find images de-risks that scenario.
Photoshelter has an AI search that will find specific people in your organisation in photos (if you’ve trained it), as well as allowing you to describe the images you’re looking for.
The downside of Photoshelter is the lack of transparency on pricing, you simply can’t get a sense of the cost without talking to Sales and getting a demo. Some digging has suggested that PhotoShelter's plans start at $12/month for 4 GB of storage, with higher tiers offering more storage and advanced features. While this is reasonable, small businesses needing large storage capacities may find the cost scaling up quickly.
Also its tools seem ideal for photographers and small creative teams who need a client-facing platform and frequently sell or distribute their work. However, for general business use, its focus on photography-specific tools might be overkill.
Dash
dash.app
DASH is a digital asset management (DAM) system specifically designed for small to medium businesses, AND they publish their prices so its clear what you are going to have to commit to although I guess you’ll need to be a medium sized business before $79 per month is something you can afford and see the efficiencies from.
It’s built to import images from Google Drive and Dropbox so if that’s where you’re currently piling up your photolibrary then you can be up and running with Dash really quickly without spending days downloading and reuploading your images.
As with Photoshelter, Dash uses AI powered search and keyword tagging to help you find your images fast and easy. It also has an effective setup for sharing images and collaborating with people in and outside of your business.
Dash also integrates with Slack and Teams if you want to tie it in to how you organise projects.
Filecamp
filecamp.com
I’ll admit that of the three platforms Filecamp was my favourite, mainly because with my commercial head on the starting price is affordable even for the smallest of enterprises.
As with the other platforms user management are a given and it allows you to add your own search tags to images as well as get it to automate tagging through image analysis.
What I most liked about Filecamp was its ability to handle other filetypes as well as images. So when you are collaborating on a project, or keeping your marketing materials together you can also add in PDFs, Words files etc. and create differently branded portals for any third-party companies you might need to work with.
Conclusions
PhotoShelter is ideal for photographers and small creative teams who need a client-facing platform and frequently sell or distribute their work. However, for general business use, its focus on photography-specific tools may be overkill.
Dash is perfect for small teams that need organized, searchable archives and collaboration-friendly tools. It strikes a good balance between usability and cost, though its storage and asset cap may be a limitation for larger operations.
Filecamp suits businesses that require scalable storage and flexible branding options. Its unlimited user policy makes it attractive for growing teams, though smaller operations may like the low entry fee although its entry-tier features might be too basic for some.
Really its about understanding your business workflow, but if you are in a place where you need to start managing you business images assets more effectively that a shared Dropbox or Google Drive folder then these three are a good place to start.