I learned from a work partner that a brand needs an image library of its own in order to do quality marketing.
Of course each company has different needs and will require different images. A sporting goods store, for example, needs several images of each item on a white background for e-commerce. That same company also needs photos of people using its products for effective communication.
A consultancy, on the other hand, needs photos of the partners/consultants and of the office, but also images that can illustrate its services. Even if they are purchased from royalty-free libraries. We recently developed the Visual Identity of a consultancy and in the process selected an image library of its own, which will be used to produce social media posts, presentations and ads.
Gathering quality images
Hiring a professional photographer to create these images is essential, but it’s not the only thing that matters. New products are developed and images with other models become necessary to promote a new line. The photography process has to become cyclical.
Hiring a designer to select a group of images from royalty-free libraries is also a solution. The designer gathers the brief for these images from the client and does the search. Once approved by the decision makers, the company has a coherent set of images.
But the problems appear
Not every company has a culture for handling these images. Many receive the link with the high-resolution files and pass it straight to the agency building the site or ads. They don’t create a policy for use and storage. Over time the investment is lost: the photographer doesn’t keep the images for long and the agency only downloaded the files that interested them.
Others even download the images to one computer, but it crashes and all the files are lost.
That is without mentioning the problem of locating one image among so many, or sharing all these high-resolution files with a new agency so that it can start work.
Solutions that come with experience
Over time I discovered that managing an image library of your own is a complex task. Rules have to be defined and applied. New versions of files that were already in the library are developed and need to be incorporated. Images with small flaws need special treatment that the photographer did not foresee.
An image library of your own must be well managed to stay alive. The images need to be in a secure environment and access to them must be easy for the whole team involved in marketing and sales.
New images need to be added to the library often, and all of them need to be well edited and ready to use.
Working on the organization of several image libraries, we felt the need to develop a platform for our clients to distribute images to agencies and end clients.
So we modified our BrandGuide platform, originally created only to share Visual Identity Manuals, to manage images as well.
Going beyond the image library
We also noticed that, besides all the effort to generate and securely store this set of images, many of them need adjustments or cutouts.
We developed and applied naming policies, to help with file recognition and improve website SEO.
Through BrandGuide we can manage users, giving access to subsets of images.
All of this with guaranteed security and image backup on one of the world’s safest systems, Amazon S3.
Get in touch with us to find out how we can help your company have an image library of its own and avoid losing one of the most important resources today: your images.
