Asset Bank Announce Upgraded Edition
One of our featured DAM Vendors, Asset Bank (who are owned by UK firm, Bright Interactive) have announced some new features for their DAM system in their October release:
- Embed slideshows using HTML5 code snippets
- Duplicate checking using perceptual hashes
- Improved asset selection options for news and home page areas
- Alterations to permissions to enable sub-administrator users (with the latter having configurable levels of reduced functionality)
- Excel export now includes thumbnails and metadata
- General user interface improvements and better tablet support
More details are on the Asset Bank website .
A lot of the points seem to be fairly minor updates and yet further cases of vendors needing to continuously play ‘catch up’ with each other (the HTML5 snippets feature sounds similar to what vendors like Razuna and Picturepark offer with their ‘Ports’ feature – amongst several others).
The perceptual hashes upgrade was a noteworthy item, however. The vast majority of DAM systems now offer MD5 or SHA-1 checking for duplicates, a smaller number now employ perceptual hashes which use averaging techniques to compensate for cropping, re-sizing and other alterations to the source. This is more likely to detect a match even when the asset has been modified and should be a more robust technique for identification of both exact and near match duplicates. A further issue to consider is what happens when one is found using this method. With MD5, it is unequivocal, whether a cropped alternative should be permitted to be uploaded is a more complex topic and suggests that more configuration options like thresholds etc may be required to deal with different cases.
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This a good point – as you mention, perceptual hash matching can be much more useful for duplicate checking, but does introduce subjectivity in terms of whether or not a user considers two images to be duplicates. In Asset Bank we have tried to be flexible about this – the ‘thresholds’ used in the algorithm can be configured (so we can change them depending on a particular client’s requirements) and if a duplicate is found at upload then Asset Bank gives the user the choice of what to do, i.e. skip the file or continue and add it anyway.