Extensis headquartered in Portland, Oregon offers Portfolio, their digital asset management (DAM) platform.
$9
per month
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Image Relay Marketing Delivery keeps digital assets and product information in one place with the goal of supporting fast, seamless creation and delivery.
Extensis Portfolio is perfect for organizing photos as long as everything is keyworded correctly. If it is not part of a group's workflow to add a description or keywords to your photos, then you'd be dumping your photos into a pool with no way to search for them. Extensis Portfolio is best utilized when you give it the ability to help you search (by keywords yourself).
Image Relay is perfect for a creative team that is putting out a lot of content and always creating more. It works great with freelancers and has customizable access for different groups of individuals. I have not seen the PIM side of things with Image Relay. Management chose a different system for our PIM but it was prior to learning about Image Relay. The system we have for PIM seemed more robust for syndicating to multiple channels, however, it does not have the collaboration a creative team needs as Image Relay does.
Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.
It's SO easy to create upload links and send them to people when you need materials from them. I love that you are emailed when someone uploads to a folder you created.
The support team is great at Image Relay too—I've rarely had any problems, but when I do or have questions they respond very quickly!
Learning curve. It can be very intimidating and difficult to learn for people who are not experienced with similar software.
Ease of adding new users. It's currently a long process to bring anyone new onto the platform. We have to go through our DAM manager and only they have the ability to add or remove people.
Thumbnail previews sometimes blank. Sometimes the thumbnails for photos don't load or need to be refreshed manually, which can be frustrating when needing to search through multiple folders and photos.
The AI tagging terms are too generic to really be helpful to us.
When we did our initial upload the system couldn't pull in old dates, so everything has a date of the day it was uploaded. It will be a while before searching by "most recent" works properly.
I believe once all of our staff see how efficient Image Relay is in managing our digital assets, there will be no question that the cost vs. value will mandate continued use moving forward. It literally will pay for itself in saved staff time, I believe.
I didn't have to be trained to figure out how to use it, everything is straight forward which is important when you have a lot of external-facing users on this platform. The folders help you navigate what you have but I also use the search feature a lot if I'm not sure what I'm looking for.
Because our organization tends to run software on older equipment, finding someone to support our particular configuration was a challenge. Additionally, trying to explain to someone In tech support about our issues was difficult because a lot of the issues were quirks within the software that had to be seen to be understood.
Amazing. We are having a quick call once a week to be sure we are right on track. They answer all our questions right away and if they are missing something they will just find the answer and get back to us as fast as possible. There is no need to look elsewhere!
We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky
The decision really seemed to come down to the interface, the value, and the approach to innovating how the assets were stored and accessed. It was important to us that our DAM has plenty of features and options while also not being over-designed or overcomplicated. It needed to have a flow and logic to it so that we could do more while not being overwhelmed or lost in the product. In all of these areas, Image Relay really seemed to stand out among the rest.
