DAM Weekly Round-Up – 10th September 2018


A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.

An Open Vocabulary Tagging Experiment for Discoverability

Accidental Taxonomist author Heather Hedden has recently embarked on a tag comparison experiment with one of her colleagues.  The aim of the exercise is to ascertain whether tagging two identical articles with a different set of vocabularies has any discernible effect on their discoverability on the web.  Wikidata and VIAF were chosen as the sources for the controlled vocabularies, with the comparison being made against typical terms for a blog post.  The results will be published on her blog in a few weeks.

Getty’s AI Tool Gets Nearer the Goal

Stock photography agency Getty have recently launched their ‘Panels by Getty Images’ – and AI-assisted tool that takes a different approach to sourcing images for editorial content.  Unlike most other artificial intelligence image-recognition solutions that attempt to automatically tag images (with often less than satisfactory results), Panels extracts keywords from pre-prepared editorial content, which it then uses to suggest images from its vast library.  Getty claims that the tool can learn over time from human editors in order to provide increasingly relevant results.  Thanks to DAM expert José Grillo for bringing this one to our attention.

2017 DAM Salary Survey Results Published

The results from the 2017 DAM salary survey have now been published and are available to download from the DAM News website.  Previously managed by the now defunct DAM Foundation, and subsequently picked up by the newly-formed DAM Federation, the most recent dataset contains anonymised responses from over 100 participants involved in the management of both commercial and non-commercial DAM systems.  The zipped download, comprising a PDF and associated Excel files is freely available from both the DAM News website and the DAM Whitepapers website.

How to Manage Stock Photos in Your DAM System

DAM vendor Widen have recently published an updated guide to managing stock photos and the associated licensing rights within your DAM system.  Originally posted in 2015, the article has been revamped to provide a good starting point for guidance about copyright, usage, permissions, metadata, analysis and watermarking of digital assets.  In an increasingly aggressive and litigious environment, taking measures to sufficiently safeguard your own content and observing the copyright and IP restrictions of licensed material should be a primary concern for DAM users.

3 new updates for more streamlined & functional DAM

DAM outfit Pics.io has recently announced a number of updates to its Google-based service.  What strikes me as a slightly muddled article, the release notes appear to be a combination of casually mocking their “puzzled” users and apologising for the confusion caused by the previous Pics.io interface concerned with labels and keywords.  Peppered with hokey language and inappropriate colloquialisms (“where the hell are…”, “we’re dying for your feedback”), and concluding with an open admission that they’ve only “just learned” how to preserve transparency in PNG files, I’m inclined to think that Pics.io might be better regarded by its users, and peer reviewers, if the language they employed was less informal and more educational.

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