Canto

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.

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.

First of all, having a single source of truth is truly a game changer. Having that one file that is mirrored in other places makes having to edit it so much simpler. Additionally, the Portals are such a nice feature so that we can "share" our assets, specific ones, to different vendors or departments within our organization takes a lot of the mundane aspects of our previous requests off our plates. There are truly so many things I love about Canto and these are just a small taste of them.

We are using Canto in the hopes that it can serve us in several ways. One area that we would like to see is more of a desktop app that functions similar to Dropbox in that we can access our files in our Finder vs. the Canto Connector for Adobe. Also, the ability to be more granular with our user permissions and rights management. And more customization with the Presets as well as the ability to designate the Focal Spot on an image. (We have lots of ideas to help improve and add to Canto but these are the top ones)