We organise our work into quarters and months, so remembering where a certain image lives would be much harder if we just had to use Finder on its own.
“I find it so useful, for both specific and general searches. Liana Phillips, Head of Design & Brand, concurs. And you can search for a specific file type as well, which lets you see only your Photoshop or Illustrator files at a glance.” You can use multiple search parameters, like stipulating that you want something that contains X but does not contain Y, to really narrow down the results and locate that needle in the haystack. Simon added: “I also like the advanced search options, which are handy when you’re struggling to find a very specific asset. "I’ve used Portfolio several times a day, every day." But Portfolio has meant I can just quickly type in a keyword and find what I’m looking for in seconds.” “With the team working from home for nearly a year now, accessing our primary server via a VPN and not being able to just shout across the office to ask where a file was saved could have slowed things down. Xenia said: “I’ve used Portfolio several times a day, every day – it’s absolutely the fastest way to find a picture you know exists but can’t quite place. "Seeing results with thumbnail images makes identifying the right file more convenient."įor fellow Designer Xenia Spray-Smith, speed has proved the main benefit.
There’s no need to manually find the project folder, and it means files don’t get lost if they were accidentally stored in the wrong folder previously.” We catalogue all our projects with a unique job number, so with Portfolio, it’s just a case of searching for that number and seeing all the files related to that job.
“Often, I’ll be looking for imagery, so seeing search results displayed with thumbnail images makes identifying the right file so much more convenient. We spoke to some of our marketing colleagues to hear how they’ve taken advantage of this popular digital asset management solution.ĭesigner Simon Curd, who often works on our video projects, said: “Essentially, Extensis Portfolio allows us to browse through all of the assets on our server – and there are loads – to find things much more quickly. What’s Portfolio actually like to use in the real world? And it isn’t just images – Portfolio also works with videos, audio files, documents, graphics and even large satellite or aerial images, with support for new file formats being updated regularly.īut enough about the features. You can resize an asset to a lower resolution or convert it to another file format from within Portfolio itself, opening up plenty of self-service opportunities to save your creative teams’ time. Once uploaded, you can conveniently drag and drop them between Portfolio and your folders, your desktop or supported apps including big-hitters like Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator or Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.Ĭonversion’s covered, too. Files can be added simply by dragging them into Portfolio, or alternatively by mapping the already-organised folders housed on your network. Portfolio also excels when it comes to uploading assets and working with them in other applications. (Of course, you can still add your custom metadata fields for keywords specific to your organisation or industry terminology, a process sped up by batch tagging functionality.) AI-enabled image recognition and metadata extraction can save users tons of time, picking out the important features of your files that are likely to contain precisely the phrases you’ll search for them with lately.
That automatic keywording is particularly impressive. By creating a repository for all your assets with relevant keywords and metadata, it effectively indexes files in a much more user-friendly way, ensuring they’re easier to access whenever they’re needed next. It’s Portfolio that our designers have used most frequently, though. Whether it’s Universal Type Server, which provides font management for larger teams, or the geospatial image compression tool GeoExpress, their products provide practical solutions to challenges that might otherwise slow work down.
US-based software firm Extensis is behind the secret weapons in many a creative’s arsenal.