Extensis headquartered in Portland, Oregon offers Portfolio, their digital asset management (DAM) platform.
$9
per month
Pics.io
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Pics.io is a solution for organizing and managing all digital assets. With this digital asset management software, users can quickly search and retrieve their creative files, collaborate with colleagues on new projects, and share their work with clients and partners.
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).
If you are looking for an affordable solution for logos, photos or videos this is one of the best solutions we have found. It handles several file types and provides a more affordable option than other DAM services. If you are looking for an enterprise DAM solution this is probably not what you are looking for but it doesn't pretend to be that.
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.
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.
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.
Helpful onboarding support and also a very relaxed introductory demo and trial period. The support team walked me through all stages of linking our Drive account and adding assets. The online support site has a ton of resources and helpful explanations. Email support was also a big help to get us started.
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
Pics.io has a more approachable setup and pricing structure for our needs. It also uses a familiar online storage setup for an easier learning curve. We also didn't have to pay for a higher storage tier that we wouldn't end up needing. The other services were definitely in the running but the ability to use our existing Google account was a big plus.
