Looking for Alternative to Extensis Portfolio?

As an engineering company, we take a lot of pictures when working on different projects. When starting a new project, it’s always good to look at similar projects we’ve already worked on — but this was impossible because our files were scattered all over the server.

We had many protocols in place to keep the server organized, but over time it got messy. That’s why we needed a solution to organize our archive.

Before Daminion, we would spend hours searching for the right file to use in our presentations. We did try a different application, but we found it difficult to navigate.

Daminion strikes a perfect balance between standalone ‘wannabe’ catalog software and DAM suites that are way too expensive and complicated for our purposes.

During those hectic festival days without Daminion, we had to choose between getting some sleep and delivering the best results. Now, with Daminion, we can do both!

Each employee spends less time searching through folders and more time growing the company. As a systems director, it gives me a nice, clean feeling to know all our media is properly organized and can be located within a few short clicks.

I consider Daminion’s excellent support team to be one of the best insurance policies we ever bought.

I think the benefit is that you’ve got easy access to all your digital assets, and I’m a firm believer in keeping all your images in-house and not having them floating around. You want to keep your information nice and secure when it comes to your images.

A great feature is that multiple users can access and make changes to images, but with everything in one place and version control history, you can see exactly who made those changes and when.

The time saved really depends on what the artists are searching for. If it’s a niche item they’re sure we’ve drawn before but can’t recall where — which is common after 14 years — it can save hours of drawing.

If they’re looking for something they know we’ve used frequently and just need a starting point, it can save them around 10 to 15 minutes. In all cases, it’s a valuable tool.

Our priority was finding a solution that allowed us to have a visual representation, a quick snapshot, such as a PDF, without the need to navigate through large AutoCAD or Revit files. The ability to swiftly scan a floor layout plan, which contained all the essential details, was what we aimed for.

Would you recommend Daminion?

Definitely. I think it’s a highly effective system, particularly if you’re dealing with substantial metadata and file organization requirements. The capability to add extensive metadata to files and maintain an organized file system is definitely a strong point.

We genuinely appreciate the feature that allows us to create categories and subcategories, going beyond mere keywords. The visual representation of these categories is quite user-friendly.

I knew for sure that there was a photo, but I could not remember where. That began my 4-hour marathon of searching for one photo — and then I realized everything had gone too far. I needed a special solution.

The underlying problem we solved with Daminion is time. We’ve reduced searching time from hours to minutes.

We tried to create an image catalog with multi-user access, but our assets were scattered across disks and cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox, making it difficult to use photos and track current licenses.

As part of our work, we take photos of different animals and plants. These images are needed immediately for brochures and manuals, and later for books — so they must not be lost. Daminion helps us create a centralized archive and makes photo searching much easier.