Canto reviews

We moved our image library over to Canto about 2 years ago and I have found it to be a reliable and easily navigable platform. It's very easy to use and out of the three DAMs I've worked with, professionally, it's the easiest and most straight-forward interface.

I have very few complaints. I would love it if we could customize the branding of the platform a little more and it would be nice if there was an option to make the lightbox preview files were a little larger. (There is an option to make them larger, but the difference between the smallest view and the largest view is negligible.) There is also an issue trying to rename files once they have been uploaded. That still doesn't work. If you need to rename a file, you'll have to rename outside of Canto and re-upload.

The product itself is straight forward, easy to use and fairly customizable. The tagging system works great, file storage is good (once you identify what you would like), upload links are beneficial and the portals are key for deliverable.

The configuration of SSO does not allow enough control for the administrators of this tool, it also caused quirks for administrative accounts, where one experience via login vs via SSO was different for the admins; and the system didn't recognize licenses as being used when configured via SSO. Overall, we had to disable it for the time being which is a big loss/hit to our change management process.

The Style Guide tool is a great idea, but needs some work and should not be used as a deciding factor in the tool. It needs some more work and analysis on managing font, including details on using logos, etc. to be a proper style guide. It works well for corporate colours, and that's about it.

Lastly, the integration process needs some evaluation on the Canto side. It is lengthy, the "integration specialists" cannot answer questions that we can figure out ourselves with ease, and it doesn't seem like there is much support or guidance. In all honesty, we could do it ourselves must faster.

Canto is way better than trying to sort through photos on Finder or Dropbox. You can tag images and put them in folders and search for key words. I like that you can also sort by pending/approved/rejected. It helps us keep photos organized by style, season, color, etc. I like that you can share folders with certain people.

The software is not very intuitive. The sorting by date hardly works, it is very finicky. The "zoom" boxes are more distracting than useful. Portals don't sync well. Portals should have more granular access and control. The interface is basic at best. Text runs off the screen, menus don't actually expand. Certain email providers can't get access.

• One source of truth for a wide range of assets
• Prevents access and server issues with a team spread throughout the country
• Easy to use and deploy, while constantly refining structure and strategy
• Branded portals allow our employees to self-serve versus manually managing daily requests

• Interface can be clunky; needs a modern refreshed makeover!
• More style guides to customize for different needs and brands within one organization

I can now share images to individuals or groups of people without being tethered to VPN, or large files on transfer sites outside of the organization.

There have been a few features that could be improved, but Canto listens to feedback and often implements the suggestions quickly, or has great solutions.

As a project manager, what I like most about Canto is the ability to search through metadata and quickly and easily find an asset I was looking for. I also like the ability to easily share assets, through email, dropbox, links, etc.

I wish the level of access we are paying for would allow more "power users" and more storage. But, we can always purchase more as the need arises.

Canto has many great product, but this one is perfect for those who are struggling with photo storage and management. We use Canto to store, tag, organize and search for our photos. As a company with many events it's perfect for tagging and finding our participants. Their facial recognition has proven to be an excellent asset to us.

The system is great, however it can get bogged down with resizing photos to thumbnail, slowing the scrolling speed when manually looking/ searching for photos.

Canto has made it easy for us to have all our usable photography accessible in one place. It's super easy to put together and share a customized set of images and logos.

Cropping and resizing is cumbersome for new users.

We needed a solution to get our ever-growing photo and video library under control. Canto offered the most robust yet easy to use system for organization of our digital assets.

File/folder trees, albums, smart albums, keywords, tags, facial recognition, and most importantly duplication detection that actually works.

as a relitivly small business Canto was an big expence for us espically when compared to the relitive low costs for online storage like dropbox or google drive and google photos.

It is very user-friendly. It's visual and easy to navigate. It has great search and filter features. You can send people directly to an asset without giving them access to everything.

You can upload a separate cover image; you have to use one that is already in your library; it has to be an actual asset. This is difficult if your fold of assets only contains font or color libraries, the thumbnails have no visual.

Several features have really simplified my photo management role. Metadata is customizable to your needs - and while it takes careful thought initially, when set up is easy to apply. 'Upload links' allow outside people to add photography directly to the system in a controlled manner - this has significantly helped with timeliness and ease of receiving photography. I love the branding portal, and the versioning capabilities. I also love the Facial Recognition feature - no more tagging the same people over and over. The company consistently improves the software and innovates - releasing frequent feature updates.

While it is fairly intuitive, there are aspects (of the portals for example) that need to be explained to a new user - this can be time consuming. I have been frustrated that new features are sometimes expensive paid add-ons, even when they were discussed as 'coming' during the research process (features I thought would be included with upcoming releases). As much as possible, try to envision future features you will need and consider that in your contract discussions.

I love Canto's Facial recognition feature! We have a lot of assets where we need to identify people and facial recognition has changed everything! now we can search for people by name and access every photo asset we have of that person! Game changer! I also love being able to relate files and add custom fields to assets. This has come in so handy when we need to connect people's images to their stories and FOIP information. Canto has really helped us work smarter and not harder to find all of the assets we have in a more dynamic way!

We have found the uploading of assets to be a little more work than anticipated. The Canto Connect desktop application is helpful but when initially setting up out canto product it is a lot of work. When you have over 20,000 assets to upload it takes a team of people to make that happen and a good amount of time to get everything uploaded.

- High quality visual display
- Easy to share assets with clients
- Search functionality is awesome

- One off asset links continuously break or don't work.
- Support team doesn't do much. Does a lot of blaming issues on internet.
- Program logs you out constantly.
- Clients are unable to mark assets as approved or not approved.
- You can't filter assets by comments, only if you are tagged.
- The extras are pricey - admins, contributors, portals, etc.

1. Canto team was very supportive during the onboarding process
2. Endless possibilities with tagging images
3. Ability to use directly in Adobe products with plug-in

1. No uncheck all feature
2. Issues with uploading large batch of files

Canto helps organize our thousands of digital assets. We especially like that we can upload photos, videos, music, and Adobe files. It is helpful as a photo library but also in project collaboration.

Canto is not terribly user friendly. Customer service is great and is eager to help you, but some features are buried and if not in frequent use you'll find yourself asking for help for the same tasks.

The software has a bit of everything, and it just works. The most complicated element is setting up your own metadata structure, and that's really an internal conversation about organisational culture, how we think, what we need. We love the portal functionality. There are tonnes of ways to upload, and lots of nice, very different ways to add metadata to your files.

The aesthetic is slightly dated, but that's honestly a minor quibble. Sometimes keeping it simple is what helps it work so well.

Canto makes it easy to keep all of our creative assets in one place, and perfectly accessible by team members as well as the full company and clients. I was able to customize my interface perfectly for the needs of my team and our workflow. I am now able to run most of my asset reviews right on the platform, make sure that all assets are current, and organize/categorize appropriately.

I still end up using Vimeo for my video versioning and review process. But I upload the final assets to Canto. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Canto rolled out a video review tool in the near future. Their developers are always listening to the customers' requests. It isn't unusual to ask for a little feature tweak and then see it implemented in the next build of their software. Incredible.

Awesome asset management tool to collaborate on with coworkers. Whether its within your team or collaborating with other teams, its the best way to keep all of the assets and comments/copy in one place. Before Canto, everything was done over email and messages/assets would be lost. With Canto, things are trackable and always in one place. The searchability function helps save so much time when lookin for specific tasks. love working in Canto!

This is a bit of user error, but when a coworker comments directly to someone else, they need to comment their @name for them to get a notification otherwise you never know they made a comment

Easily upload images directly or lock down to contributors so that any uploads need to be approved. Being able to sort projects by files and create specific jobs within those makes organization easy.

This needs an app - this is difficult to use from a mobile device and an app would put it over the edge.

After getting the old system upgraded, my client was able to offload some of the work the creative team previously did, to an account services team. That team was able to fulfill client requests for images without getting the creative group involved. It helped speed the responses to clients and vendors as well as balance the workload.

So far we have not had any internal issues or complaints!

The best part of Canto is how easy it is to use. We add tags and put assets in a folder. But, it's easy for people who aren't using these assets every day to use the search function and find what they're looking for.

I really wish there was a Canto app so it's easier to download things from Canto to my phone for easy social posting. It's also slow a lot of the time. It sometimes takes a long time to upload videos and load big files.

Easy to use, great for collaboration with both external and internal team members. Ability to add custom fields for storing metadata. The search feature is great.

It's on the expensive side for covering just our basic needs.

Large amount of storage space, multiple download and sharing options, ability to tag assets with keywords.

Slow to upload (slow overall), the ever-changing interface (making our tediously-made "how to" guides for staff quickly irrelevant).

Customer Service: If I ever email our account representative with a question or change to our account I hear back very quickly, many times within the hour.
User Interface: The UI is very user friendly. We've had no issues with non-technical users adopting the system.
Scalability: We love that we were able to start small and grow.

We've had some challenges with growing our the libraries and how to restrict folders, but our account manager has been working through those with us.

The ease of access with Canto was one of the main selling features for us. Rather than trying to have multiple users fighting for access to our photos and creative assets on a single server, we now can access this any time, any where. It's incredibly user friendly, and has been easy to teach other members of the company how to navigate quickly. The overall look of the software is visually appealing and it's very simple to organize.

There are almost no cons that I can think of in terms of the software. We briefly had an issue with tags not registering on new uploads, but that was resolved very quickly and may have just been an internet glitch. Whenever I've had a question or concern, if i couldn't find the answer i needed from the internal help function, the Support Team respond so quickly that any issues are resolved almost immediately.