A Brief Guide to WordPress Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Are you Storing and Categorizing Correctly in WordPress?

Given the usage of the Internet in our lives, everything from a small piece of information to a detailed personal photo album has become digital assets. Although this information was stored electronically in floppy drives (some decades ago), USBs and Hard Drives (still in use), the introduction of online cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive has changed the landscape of how information is now stored and categorized for use.

Let’s take this whole conversation in the world of websites where WordPress is currently ruling. Since websites are a means of information, it is obvious that there would be some form of storage and categorization system. This system is termed as WordPress Digital Asset Management (WDAM).

In this most basic sense, it operates similar to how you would use Dropbox or Google Drive, but it is far more advanced. In terms of defining it:

“Digital asset management is about storing, categorizing, and sharing digital assets (images, audio files, videos, PDFs, and etc.)“

In a well-functioning and intelligently-planned digital asset management (DAM) system, all of the content or asset is stored and cataloged in a centralized repository. This needs to be done correctly so that the visitors of the website can see the information correctly and more importantly quickly. This matters when the website’s performance is being considered. However, before using it correctly, it is important to know that WordPress does not contain most of these features in its default version. Therefore, to make most of the WordPress Digital Asset Management system, you’ll have to have plugins.

So, in this article, we will be focusing on a small crash course in WordPress Digital Asset Management where we will cover the most basic topics starting with understanding WordPress Digital Asset Management, its needs, plugins that can be used for correctly storing, categorizing, and using the assets.

Hopefully, by the end of this article you will be able to answer yourself the question posed in the beginning.

Let’s get this course started!!

What is WordPress Digital Asset Management?

Normally, WordPress media libraries work to ease up storing images and other documents. But, it fails abruptly in most cases when it comes to cataloging and sharing those images and documents. Moreover, there is a possibility that an important file could disappear quickly because it doesn’t contain a taxonomy or is not categorized properly, which is essential for organizing and sharing old files.

So, here comes WordPress Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution into action, which adds more functionality to WordPress Install. DAM helps improve cataloging of your media files for easy and quick sharing. Therefore, a digital asset management system with effective and efficient WordPress plugins can improve management functionalities of all types of content (images, documents, etc).

Simple enough to understand, right?

Why do you need a WordPress Digital Asset Management?

As mentioned above, WordPress Digital Asset Management helps with the organization of the digital files. But that should not be the only reason you need it right? So, in order to help you fully understand the need of having a well-planned and correctly-implemented DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, here are our few reasons:

1. Cost-Effective:

Although, you have a plethora of options available for you to save your most important data elsewhere such as Google Drive and DropBox ( Cloud storage services) but their membership packages keep mounting when the number of users are increased. On the other hand, this is not the case with WordPress DAM plugins.

2. Centralized Storage:

Digital Asset Management is phenomenally helpful as it wipes out authority of few and lets everybody access and store information in a time of need. Ever since, remote working has become a new normal as a result of the pandemic of Covid-19, with centralized storage, you and your remote teams can access digital content easily from anywhere.

3. Time-Saving:

If you work for a professional digital agency or a freelance graphic designer or a feature writer for a popular tabloid, finding images, videos or a PDF could turn into an experience resembling searching for a needle in a haystack. Digital Asset Management is the way of saving your important digital assets so that you could retrieve them, when you need them.

4. Ease of Decluttering:

If you are a creative designer or a writer, you can guess about clutter piled up once a project is done. Maybe, you’ve loads of unnecessary files stored in your PC making it run slower and slower. So, when you use a strategic and well-managed system for Digital Asset Management, you come at ease of decluttering your WordPress sites from useless stuff.

That was convincing enough!!

Now that we have covered the importance, let’s come to the point of where to get a WordPress Digital Asset Management system.

What are the Best Plugins for WordPress Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

WordPress Digital Asset Management takes time, efforts and resources to be successful for an individual or a company. For successfully using WordPress Digital Asset Management, you need plugins.

In this section, we are going to discuss the four best WordPress Digital Asset Management (DAM) plugins so you can manage your digital assets flawlessly:

  1. Folders – A WordPress Plugin to Store your Media Files, Posts and Page
  2. Enhanced Media Library – A Plugin For WordPress with Matchless Functionalities
  3. Brandfolder – A WordPress Plugin that simplifies Digital Asset Management
  4. Phraseanet Plugin – A Top-notch Open Source Digital Asset Management Plugin

Let’s review each of these plugins in detail below.

1. Folders - A WordPress Plugin to Organize your Media Files, Posts and Pages

Folders

Some of the best features of using this plugin are:

    • It can keep your media files highly organized in folders i.e., photos, videos, website pages and blog posts. Alongside, you can use multiple folders for storing your crucial data.
    • For web developers, it comes with special features where they can keep pages of clients’ websites in order throughout the development process. You can also opt to mark a folder with start or rename your clients’ files uniquely to make them easily identifiable. And for bloggers, they can easily manage their whole collection of data comfortably. Again, they can assign categories, topics and dates to make content easily filterable.

At WP-Bridge, we like to call it ‘a perfect tool for content creation’ because it organizes all content into directories so you won’t have to invest extra-time looking for mission-critical files and folders. Moreover, if you want to replace your website files after a few months, this plugin has an easy to option as well.

2. Enhanced Media Library - A Plugin For WordPress with Matchless Functionalities

Media

Enhanced media library is a safe plugin where you can do numerous things all at once. It is a really helpful tool which lets you upload disallowed file types. Installing “Enhanced Media Library – A WordPress plugin’ will save your precious time, money and energy as it is a simple and easy-to-use solution made to ease up WordPress media flow.

The features of this plugin allows you to:

    • Build custom taxonomies and can avail unlimited third-party taxonomies for folders, projects, authors and topics as per your requirements.
    • Add configurable filters helping you in managing filters accordingly. Plus, you can enable and configure filters in the media library. You can show or hide data, taxonomy filters, and so much more.
    • Make WordPress media library highly convenient and user-friendly with its timely enhancements features. It makes organizing your bulk information easy. All you’ll have to enable captions to make files easily recognizable in the media library. You can change order options to rearrange media items, that too, manually.

 

Pretty neat!!

3. Brandfolder - A WordPress Plugin that simplifies Digital Asset Management

Digital

In the world of WordPress, ‘Brandfolder’ is considered as a first-rate WordPress Digital Asset Management plugin for WordPress users. Why? Just go through these features to understand:

    • It can help you, especially creative designers and marketers, manage and distribute their digital assets with ease.
    • You can access and manage your digital assets easily from cloud-based and intuitive storage of Brandfolder.
    • It enables you to see about your digital assets through Brand Intelligence – a mix of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). This feature gives you complete insight about where your digital assets are, how they are being used and which is your top-performing digital asset.
    • You are free to edit your Brandfolders directly through the WordPress admin panel.
    • With ‘Brandfolder browser – a Media Library Integration’, you can import your digital assets from your cloud-storage to be used in your website content or in a blog post of your WordPress site.
    • It lets you incorporate ‘Brandfolder’ shortcode in pages, posts, and widgets to let you make a popup Embed link: [Brandfolder id = “mapmyfitness” collection=”mapmyrun” query=”” text=”View our Brandfolder” classes=”brandfolder”]

With features like this, why wouldn’t you want one?

4. Phraseanet Plugin - A Top-notch Open Source Digital Asset Management Plugin

Phraseanet

Phraseanet is widely-known ‘open source digital asset management’ software that can store and organize your files. Comparatively, it is far more useful than the default WordPress media library. You won’t have to worry about whether your digital assets are well-protected or not. That’s why it is a perfect solution for companies, start-ups, and digital agencies when it comes to cost-effective management of digital assets.

You just need to download this software, host it and integrate it with WordPress Install.

If you want to monitor activities on Phraseanet, or want to track which documents have been downloaded, and who are the most active users and so much more, you can do this all with this plugin. And, you can export all of your reports in CSV format.

This ends our list of top 4 WordPress Digital Asset Management plugins. Let’s move on to integrating the WordPress Digital Asset Management Plugins for effective use.

What are the Quick Integration Options for Effective WordPress Digital Asset Management?

If you’re using a digital asset management system already and are looking for ways to further ease the working with WordPress, you’ll have to integrate Digital Asset Management plugins. So, why are we discussing this. Because you will not find integration options with every digital asset management.

The easiest way to integrate Digital Asset Management in your WordPress is through the use of ‘embedded codes’. It enables you to add media from the DAM system into WordPress sites without any need of direct integration.

Embedded codes are useful in many ways. For instance, WordPress website owners don’t have to download files from the WordPress Digital Asset Management tool and they don’t need to re-upload those files back to the WordPress website. Just copy the embed code from the Digital Asset Management system and paste it into the WordPress website.

With embed codes, you won’t have to be worried about updating your files because they will automatically change the file in your digital asset management system – the only thing you’ll have to do is to upload the file only once in your DAM system.

It is a bit technical and can go in a different direction if you do not know how to handle it. You can use a consultant or a WordPress Maintenance Company to help you with this especially when it comes to actually knowing if you are using a Digital Asset Management system to begin with.

Answering the Question...

Technically, WordPress isn’t fit for Digital Asset Management, but when you incorporate effective WordPress plugins for digital asset management, it can be massively helpful. In order to find out if you actually have a WordPress Digital Asset Management plugin or if you are using one correctly, just have a WordPress Website Technical Audit completed by a reputed WordPress Maintenance Company, and get the answer you are looking for. After all, information or digital assets is the key to any company’s success.

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