Product photos have become inseparable from e-Commerce. It’s rare to find customers these days who can buy a product online without demanding to see the photos. The main reason is that, when shopping online, customers are not able to physically see or touch the products they are interested in buying. High-quality product photos help to overcome this limitation by providing a quality customer experience by sharing with them detailed, accurate information about the products they are considering purchasing.

In the early days of e-commerce, product photos were typically simple and basic, with limited resolution and detail. However, as e-commerce has grown in popularity and technology has advanced, the use of product photos has become increasingly sophisticated. Today, high-quality, detailed product photos are considered a standard in e-commerce and are essential for creating an engaging, interactive shopping experience for customers.

But you need to constantly organize these images, and this is where an image organizer software or better yet, a DAM is going to help you a great deal!

Let’s now discover how DAM plays its role as the perfect image organizer software for product photos by serving as a single source of truth image library, making it possible to organize images by product/product category, optimize metatags, resize by templates, bulk rename and bulk export.

1. Single source of truth image library

A “single source of truth” refers to a centralized, authoritative source of information that is used to ensure consistent performance and accuracy across the entire asset chain. In the context of Digital Asset Management, a single source of truth image organizer software is a centralized repository of all the images that an organization uses. This centralization ensures that all employees or other users have access to the same versions of the images and that the assets are organized in a consistent manner.

This in turn improves efficiency and collaboration within the organization. When all images are stored in one place, it becomes much easier to find and retrieve the images that are needed. This can reduce the amount of time spent searching for images and increase the speed of project completion.

2. Organize by product/product category

DAM makes it possible to organize images by product or product category by allowing users to tag and categorize assets within the system. This makes it easy to search for and find specific images, as well as to browse through different categories of images.

The ability to organize images by product or product category is important for several reasons:

Efficient search and retrieval: The process of finding and retrieving specific images is entirely simplified, meaning there is no need to manually search through large numbers of files in the brandfolder.
Consistency: All the images of a specific product or category are kept together, providing consistency and making it easier to maintain a cohesive visual identity.
Competitive Branding: This structure of the organization facilitates consistent use of images across different marketing channels and platforms, thus helping to maintain brand consistency.
Reusability: Images can be easily used for different purposes, such as marketing, e-commerce, and product documentation.

Example: Imagine a fashion retail company with a large product image collection. Without a proper system for organizing these images, it could be difficult for the marketing team to find the specific images they need for a campaign or for the e-commerce team to find the images they need for their website.

With DAM software that supports the organization by product/product category, the company could tag and categorize their image collections by product, such as “jeans,” “dresses,” “shoes,” etc. This would make it easy for the marketing team to search for and find all of the images of jeans, for example, to use in a campaign promoting the company’s denim line. Similarly, the e-commerce team could quickly find all of the images of a specific product, such as a certain dress, to use on the product page on the company’s website.

3. Optimize metatags

In the context of e-commerce images, optimizing tags means making sure that the photos are tagged with the right aspects such as product name, color, size, and any other relevant information that can help to improve the users’ experience and help them find what they’re looking for easily.

Additionally, a DAM system can also automate the process of tagging images, which can save time and improve efficiency. For example, the system can automatically extract metadata such as image size, resolution, and file type, and add it to the image’s metadata. This can save e-commerce companies a lot of time and resources, especially when it comes to handling large numbers of images.

A DAM system can also be integrated with other systems such as CMS and PIM solution, which can help to streamline the process of tagging and organizing images. This makes it possible to use the same images across different channels and platforms.

4. Templated re-size

Templated resizing refers to the process of resizing an image or other visual object using a predefined template, or set of guidelines. This template can specify aspects such as the exact dimensions or aspect ratio that the resized image should have, as well as any other constraints such as resolution or file size. Templated resizing can be used to ensure consistency and uniformity in the appearance of images across a website or other digital platforms.

Example: Let’s say an e-commerce company wants to display all product images in a consistent manner across its website. They can use a templated resizing process to ensure that all product images are resized to a standard resolution, such as 800×800 pixels. This way, when the images are displayed on the website, they will all have the same size and appearance, making the overall browsing experience for the customer more seamless and consistent.

Key essential bulk renaming features in DAM software include the ability to:

• Select multiple files or brandfolder at once for renaming
• Apply a common prefix or suffix to the names of all selected files or folders
• Replace specific text in the names of all selected files or folders
• Automatically increment numbers in the names of all selected files or folders
• Use metadata such as date, camera model, etc. to generate file names
• Undo or cancel a bulk renaming operation
• Schedule bulk renaming on a regular basis.

5. Bulk re-name

Bulk renaming is the practice of changing the names of a lot of files or folders all at once instead of doing one at a time.

Let’s say you have a folder containing 1000 product images, and each image has a different file name that doesn’t provide any information about the product. You can use the bulk renaming feature in DAM to apply a naming convention to all the files, such as “product_name_sku_color_size.jpg”.

This way, all of the files will be named in a consistent manner, providing clear information about the product, such as name, sku, color and size, and it will be easier for users to find and identify the images they need.

6. Bulk export

Bulk export refers to the process of exporting a large number of files or data at the same time, rather than exporting them one at a time.

If you have a folder containing a large number of product images that you want to share with a client or team members, you can use the bulk export feature in DAM to select all the images in the folder, and then export them all at once to a specified location such as a USB drive or cloud storage.

Some of the typical bulk export features that may be available in DAM software include the ability to;

• Select multiple files or folders at once for export.
• Export files in different file formats (e.g. JPEG, PNG, TIFF)
• Export files with specific metadata or naming conventions
• Export files with specific size and resolution
• Export files to specific locations on the network or the cloud
• Schedule bulk exports on a regular basis.

Conclusion

The strength of DAM software as a towering image organizer for eCommerce lies in its wide array of features that make tedious tasks, which would normally take forever with other tools, a breeze. All the important image manipulations that eCommerce companies can’t do without are already loaded up in DAM and ready to use with any templates you can think of. Plus, you can always customize the capabilities to perfectly fit your needs.

Just think of features such as bulk re-name or templated re-size, and try to imagine how marketing teams can struggle with such seemingly no-brainer tasks but which can turn out to be overwhelming when applied to multitudes of products. Yes, it’s so easy to rename a few images, even much easier to export one or two photos, or even resize a few. But what if you had to do it on thousands of images? These are the kind of challenges that DAM fixes. All you have to do is set the parameters, click, and smile away – job done!