Previously we have written two reviews comparing Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, such as Daminion to popular cloud-sync solutions and using your network file server system to manage your digital assets. In this article, we will continue the review and comparison of another popular approach to DAM using Adobe’s long-time file management solution Bridge.
In this article, we will be referencing the 2021 version of Bridge (v11.0.0).
As done in the previous articles we will be using a table below highlighting the common features and functions of Digital Asset Management solutions to that of Adobe Bridge. Afterwards we will expound on the fundamental features of a DAM and how Bridge compares.
Digital Asset Management solutions are popular among marketing and creative departments due to their features and functionality that support their content and workflows.
This is also why Adobe Bridge software can be popular with the same groups, especially with small teams and departments.
Adobe Digital Asset Management
One of the main reasons creative teams and companies are quick to adopt Bridge over a formal DAM is because it is included in the core Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
This brings up the age-old mantra, you get what you pay for. Let’s go through the different features and functionalities to determine how Adobe Bridge compares to common DAM solutions, such as Daminion.
| Features | Adobe Bridge | Daminion |
|---|---|---|
| Folder structure organization | Y | Y |
| Galleries or collections of related assets | Y | Y |
| Search by file name and folder name | Y | Y |
| Search by keywords | Y | Y |
| Search by custom tags, labels, or other custom metadata | N | Y |
| Faceted Search | N | Y |
| Support controlled vocabulary of keywords, tags, labels, or other metadata | Y | Y |
| A controlled vocabulary of search terms | N | Y |
| Show side-by-side comparison of different assets | Y | Y |
| Comparison or display of an asset’s version history | N | Y |
| Multiple image thumbnail sizes for previewing files | Y | Y |
| View file and image labels, tags and ratings | Y | Y |
| Download original versions of the file | Y | Y |
| Download transformed or alternative versions of the file | Y | Y |
| Plugs into creative applications (i.e. Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator) | Y | Y |
| Preview Work-In-Progress (WIP) layout files (indd, etc.) | Y | Y |
| Preview ‘Office’ Documents (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx) | N | Y |
| Show asset version history | N | Y |
| Publish directly to social media sites | N | Y |
| Push assets to other enterprise applications (i.e. CRM, PIM, ERP) | N | Y |
| Pull/Receive asset specific data from enterprise applications (i.e. CRM, PIM, ERP) | N | Y |
| Restrict access of assets to specific users/recipients | Y | Y |
| Restrict asset actions to specific users/recipients (i.e. view only, edit, write, etc) | Y | Y |
| Manage user access and functionality based on user group association (Active Directory, LDAP, etc) | N | Y |
| Manage user access and functionality based on user role/profile (Art Director vs Junior AD vs Contractor, etc) | N | Y |
| Check-Out/In of assets | N | Y |
| True multi-user controlled access | N | Y |
| Access media archive via web-browser | N | Y |
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Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
Compared to the cloud-sync system and network file server solutions we reviewed in the previous articles, Adobe Bridge offers the greatest competition to any Digital Asset Management solution on the market.
However, there are still some key spots where Bridge does not perform or function that are critical to any solution that would be classified as a true DAM.
Organizing
One of the main features that Adobe Bridge has historically been known for is organizing files. Bridge, like digital asset management solutions, offers an enhanced user interface over the traditional desktop browser experience.
This experience allows users to view (review), organize, move, and duplicate files into various traditional folder structures that are used by the organization.
Bridge, like most DAM solutions including Daminion, even offers the ability to organize files into collections by manually adding assets into those collections.
You can take collections a step further and create smart collections that will automatically add files to the collection based off of predetermined metadata.
This is great for the individual user to create their own collections of assets they may need quick access to on a regular basis.
However, the use of collections in Bridge is only limited to that specific instance on that machine.
Collections can’t be shared with other users on other devices. If a company allows multiple users to access a central repository via Bridge, the collections created by one user will not show up in another user’s instance of Bridge.
Adobe Digital Asset Management Review
By comparison DAMs software, including Daminion, allow one user to create a collection and if desired share it with other users. Additionally, administrators or power users can create collections that are shared with entire groups of users.
This form of collaboration greatly improves the user experience in a DAM.
In addition to collections, Bridge like some DAM solutions such as Daminion offers the ability to star rate and color tag assets. Doing so allows a user or team to quickly organize and group together assets with the same ratings or tags.
The organizational functionality of Bridge and Daminion are close and one reason why we stated earlier that Bridge is the closest competitor to Daminion. With that in mind let’s move on to the other core features where we will start to see the limitations of Bridge compared to that of Daminion.
Searching
This is where we will start to see the differences between Bridge and Daminion. Both solutions allow users to manually navigate through folder structures to find what they are looking for.
As mentioned above, both support collections for quickly finding key assets. Both even allow you to run a search by some metadata.
However, searching in Bridge is limited to Adobe’s ‘standard’ metadata. If you solely use this metadata then you are in luck. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t use a lot of that standard metadata let alone want to search by that data.
Most organizations want and need to search by custom metadata values such as brand names, product names, product numbers, skus, etc.
Searching by custom metadata is where we depart from Bridge and move on into Daminion software. Daminion allows users to run powerful searches based on customized metadata.
Not only can users run a detailed search based on the metadata, users can also filter (facet searching) amongst those results by additional custom filters or facets.
Having these custom values can help guide users to quickly narrow down their search results using company, department and even project specific metadata.
Adobe Digital Asset Management Software
The other big difference between Bridge and Daminion is the power, speed and accuracy of search results returned. This largely has to do with the indexing of assets.
Bridge does not do a lot of indexing of assets within folder structures limiting the depth and accuracy of its search results. Every time a user drills through a folder structure the software is re-indexing the content and re-generating previews.
This creates slow load times and search results.
By contrast, Daminion indexes and creates file previews when imported. This is in part what allows for faster and more accurate search results. Plus, once results have come back the assets previews load almost instantly.
The importance of speedy and accurate search results becomes a necessity when trying to meet short project deadlines, such as getting ready for a tradeshow or conference.
If users have to spend additional cumulative hours of time for previews to load these important deadlines can be missed, resulting in some instant negative financial impacts of system.
When evaluating a solution this is a key feature that companies should give a lot of weight to in the decision-making process. Take a second and think about the cost implications of a solution that is slow to load search results, file previews, inaccurate or incomplete search results because the system has to re-index the assets every time it is opened.
For any organization doing serious work at volume, speed and accuracy should be one of the most important features of the tool being used to manage their digital assets.
Metadata
Earlier I mentioned briefly about how Bridge allows users to search by, view, and even edit standard Adobe metadata fields. While this is great and a lot of the standard metadata does serve a meaningful purpose, the standard data is too limiting for a group or an entire organization of users.
When thinking about how metadata should be the data that adds meaning and value to one’s assets the standard metadata options are just not enough. Depending on the industry one does business the need of additional metadata can be expansive.
For example, retail companies need to know the brands, colors, model numbers, skus, pricing, etc for their products. Manufacturing companies need to attach metadata that ranges from part numbers and skus, to safety information, regional availability, specific market segments for their products and so forth.
Historical Cultural groups need to know people, places, dates, materials, valuation and current condition of the digital representations of the physical artifact.
All of these various types of metadata go well beyond the standard data and demand the digital asset management system like Dominion be flexible enough to support custom metadata fields, values, and taxonomies.
In terms of evaluating the return on investment of Daminion over Adobe Bridge, the power, flexibility and capability of supporting custom metadata values; and then searching by that data far outweighs the cost to benefit ratio in favor of Daminion.
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Viewing
Being able to preview an asset is fundamental in the user experience when searching through thousands or tens of thousands of digital assets.
Like we mentioned in the Organizing section above, there are a lot of similarities between what a user experiences in Bridge and Daminion.
Both support previews for common image files including camera raw versions. In Bridge 2021 they now offer previewing of video files by simply moving your mouse (scrubbing) over the thumbnail.
Both support preview generation of InDesign files and Illustrator files. So this is another area where the competition is close.
Where there starts to be a difference between the two platforms when it comes to viewing is the support of 3D files. Daminion offers preview support for 3D files and other speciality file types.
If you are a company that works with 3D files or ‘skin’ type files like used in games then this is one area you will notice a big difference.
Additionally, the other major difference when viewing files is the speed in which the previews are generated in Bridge is much slower compared to Daminion.
Not only that, but previews are generated fresh every single time the asset is touched in Bridge. If you work with large files (5MB or larger) the load times of the previews in Bridge can take a couple of seconds or longer to load depending on the file size.
As mentioned before, Daminion indexes and creates file previews when an asset is imported. This means no more trying to create new previews every time a user clicks on an asset.
One important detail to clarify about Daminion is that previews are refreshed when a new version or update of the asset has taken place. This approach to indexing previews during the import process translates into hundreds of hours spent over the course of a year waiting for previews to load.
Distributing
This is one feature that is pretty minimal to non-existent in Adobe Bridge. The closest to distributing assets that Bridge can come to is the ability to export files to a single location using a single export recipe at a time.
While Bridge 2021 does offer the ability to create export recipes these are once again, unique to that specific instance of Bridge. Export recipes, like collections, can not be shared with other Bridge users.
Additionally, Bridge can not plug into other platforms such as a PIM, CMS, WCM, CDN, etc to distribute content. It especially can not serve up content dynamically in various file sizes or formats.
This is one of the big advantages of Daminion over Bridge. The ability to create export recipes that can be shared with different users and plugining into third party platforms is one huge feature benefit of Daminion.
When thinking about investing in a DAM solution, distribution capabilities should be a major point of discussion. Remember that we are managing digital assets and that includes managing how the digital assets are sent out to your users and the world.
Protecting
Like the last section, this section belongs all to Daminion system. There are no security protection capabilities in Bridge. If a user can navigate through Bridge to the location of an asset, there is no stopping the user from doing anything to or with that asset.
Bridge can not restrict a user’s access, visibility, or interaction with a digital asset in which it can see and touch.
By contrast, Daminion allows the organization to create user groups and roles. The combination of these two settings allows administrators to limit what assets a user can see and what they can or cannot do with it.
There are countless examples of companies that have suffered huge financial losses as a result of assets being accidentally deleted, lost, stolen, or leaked out to the public.
Like distribution, asset security should be a major point of concern when managing one’s assets. The assets do not need to be highly classified for them to justify the need to be protected.
Protecting assets comes in various forms, which is one of the strengths of Daminion.
Working (in progress) files
Since Adobe currently owns the market on the applications used to produce creative assets this integration is obviously pretty streamlined. Users can preview InDesign files in Bridge and open them. One limitation though surprisingly is asset version history.
Bridge does not track version history of files, nor does it allow you to view or revert back to an older version.
While Daminion supports previews of the different Adobe file types, it allows you to track version histories of files.
From these histories you can see the different versions, plus you can open and work with an older version of an asset.
Evaluating the DAM cost
When it comes to evaluating two solutions one of the obvious and main points of comparison is the cost between the two. Since Bridge is essentially included for free with most Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions, spending any money on a third party solution is going to be somewhat of an unfair competition.
However, in this specific instance we have to look at what features are gained for the price of Daminion.
Adobe Digital Asset Management System
There are key features that come with your purchase of Daminion that do not come with the ‘Free’ solution, Adobe Bridge. These features are labeled as key because of the importance and impact they have for an organization and their users.
The return on investment for these key features are what must be evaluated when comparing Daminion to Adobe Bridge.
In terms of evaluating the return on investment of Daminion over Adobe Bridge, the power, flexibility and capability of supporting custom metadata values; and then searching by that data far outweighs the cost to benefit ratio in favor of Daminion.
Daminion was designed as a multi-user Adobe Bridge replacement for teams. Try it now!
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Adobe Digital Asset Management
If you are interested in seeing how much money Daminion can save your organization in time searching through your myriad of digital assets feel free to use the free ROI calculator
For further DAM related questions or inquiries specific to Daminion please feel free to contact us at www.daminion.net
