I learned from a working partner that a brand needs a own image bank in order to make a quality marketing.
Of course, every company has a different need and will need different images. A sporting goods store, for example, needs multiple images of each item on a white background for use in e-commerce. This same company also needs photos of people using their products for effective communication.
A consultancy, on the other hand, needs photos of the partners/consultants and the office, but it also needs images that can illustrate its services. Even if they are purchased from royalty free banks. We recently developed the Visual identity of a consultancy and in the process we selected our own image bank that will be used for the development of posts on social networks, presentations and advertisements.
Gathering quality images
Hiring a professional photographer to create these images is critical, but that’s not all that’s important. 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 royalty free stock images is also a solution. The designer raises the briefing for these images with the client and searches. Once approved with decision makers, the company has a coherent set of images.
But problems arise
Not all companies have a culture to deal with these images. Many receive the link with the high-profile files and pass it directly to the agency that is making the site or ads. It does not create a policy for usage and storage. Over time, the investment is lost: the photographer does not store the images for a long time and the agency only downloads the files that interest them.
Others even download the images to a computer, but it crashes and all the files are lost.
Not to mention the problem of locating one image among so many, or sharing all these hot files with the new agency so they can get to work.
Solutions that come with experience
Over time, I discovered that managing an image bank of my own is a complex task. Standards have to be defined and enforced. New versions of files that were already in the database are developed and need to be incorporated. Images with minor defects need special handling that the photographer did not anticipate.
The image bank itself must be well managed in order to stay alive. The images must be in a secure environment and access to them must be easy for the entire team involved in marketing and sales development.
New images need to be added to the database frequently and they all need to be well-groomed and ready for use.
Working in the organization of several image banks of our own, we felt the need to develop a platform for our clients to distribute images with agencies and end customers.
With this we modified our BrandGuide platform, originally created to share only Brand Guides, to manage images as well.
Going beyond the image bank itself
We also noticed that in addition to all the effort to generate and safely store this set of images, many of them need tweaking or cropping.
We develop and enforce naming policies to help file recognition and improve site SEO.
Through BrandGuide we can manage users, giving access to subgroups of images.
All this with guaranteed security and image backup on one of the most secure systems in the world, Amazon S3.
Contact us to find out how we can help your company to have its own image bank and avoid losing one of most important resources these days, your images.
