Digital asset management has trained us to be file-focused. That is, we think in terms of managing our logo and brochure files. But those digital files are nothing more than the “boxes” we use to share and store our content, and it’s the content of those files that matters most.

Picturepark enables you to stay focused on your content while Picturepark manages the files your applications need to work with that content. You can stop thinking about “JPEG files” or “WMV movies” and you start thinking about the purpose of that content, such as “Product Literature” or “Training Materials.” We call these content-focused groups asset classes.

When you assign an asset to an asset class (drag and drop), a few things happen automatically:

• Picturepark adds metadata fields to the asset that are defined inside the asset class
• Picturepark pre-loads those new fields with default values that make sense
• Picturepark assigns controlled vocabularies to the fields, based on your settings in the asset class

Relevant Metadata

Other DAMs force you to use a single set (schema) of metadata fields for all your digital assets. This means your Word documents have “Video Duration” metadata fields and your Videos have “Page Counts.” It also means your Accounting, Marketing and Engineering departments can’t each define their own metadata schemas.

“One size fits all” metadata schemas confuse users and make searching for assets more difficult. Picturepark asset classes offer you a more intuitive way to classify and manage your digital assets. You can give your “Event Images” the Date and Location fields they need, without having to see those fields on “Employee Photos.”

Controlled Vocabularies

Controlled vocabularies ensure the metadata values users enter come from a list of standardized terms. This ensures compliance that can make your DAM easier to use; but defining and managing those vocabularies can be cumbersome. Picturepark enables you to define your controlled vocabularies using the taxonomy (category) tree. Choose any node of the tree to be the “root” of the vocabulary, and any tags you add become the only values that can be entered into the metadata field. This ensures unwanted values won’t be entered, and it ensures context isn’t lost when using multi-definition terms like “Apple” and “Turkey.”

To ensure users from the world over can make good use of your system without extensive taxonomy training, synonyms and localized values are supported.

Temporary Metadata

Digital content in production needs metadata values that aren’t necessary once the content is approved for use. Examples include reviewer comments, workflow routing directives, milestone approvals and more. Using Picturepark, you can drag and drop to add a layer of “Production” metadata fields that can be removed when the content enters the next stage of development, which might add a new set of fields.

Layered Metadata to Support Multiple Metadata Standards

Supporting more than one metadata standard in a DAM can be a problem, but Picturepark makes it easy. First off, Picturepark offers solid support for XMP and popular metadata standards like IPTC, EXIF, PLUS and Dublin Core. Next, Picturepark enables you to “layer” the fields of one standard right over another. You can keep the fields unique to a standard isolated, while treating the fields common to multiple standards as one. You can even use this approach to layer your own institutional or workflow metadata fields over those required for metadata standards adherence.