Extensis Portfolio vs. MediaValet

Extensis Portfolio is perfect for organizing photos as long as everything is keyworded correctly. If it is not part of a group's workflow to add a description or keywords to your photos, then you'd be dumping your photos into a pool with no way to search for them. Extensis Portfolio is best utilized when you give it the ability to help you search (by keywords yourself).

Incentivized

MediaValet is an exceptional tool for our end users. We upload the images and they find them. Most often with great ease. Had we known how many images we would be adding, and our different audiences from the start, we might have set up our file structure a little differently.

Incentivized

• Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
• Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
• Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
• Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.

Incentivized

• We love Portals, as a means of creating, editing and sending collections of pictures
• The tagging system allows for end users to find our photos, without knowing where we put them
• The system is quick
• Apart from our initial edit for size, customers gets full sized uncompressed files

Incentivized

• Learning curve. It can be very intimidating and difficult to learn for people who are not experienced with similar software.
• Ease of adding new users. It's currently a long process to bring anyone new onto the platform. We have to go through our DAM manager and only they have the ability to add or remove people.
• Thumbnail previews sometimes blank. Sometimes the thumbnails for photos don't load or need to be refreshed manually, which can be frustrating when needing to search through multiple folders and photos.

Incentivized

• More flexibility/features when using Lightboxes
• Replace an old version of an asset with a newer one without having to check-out, then check-in
• Sharing an asset or a set of assets via a share link -- would be great to generate shorter, dynamic URLs for sharing as opposed to the longer string URLs it currently generates

Incentivized

The product is the best we've seen. Others on staff who use our partner's DAMs have commented that our Media Valet DAM is far and away the best they've seen. I can't say enough about Media Valet's customer service. It has been consistently helpful, quick to respond and very reliable.

New staff is able to use our DAM with an hour of training.

Because our organization tends to run software on older equipment, finding someone to support our particular configuration was a challenge. Additionally, trying to explain to someone In tech support about our issues was difficult because a lot of the issues were quirks within the software that had to be seen to be understood.

Incentivized

The team is very responsive to requests and makes a point to provide feedback or status updates before confirming solutions.

Incentivized

I mainly use MediValet to send special medical images to our partners. Collaboration with other companies is very simplified through MediaValet. The qualitatively uploaded images can be excactly assigned and organised through various filters. It is much clearer and easier for our partners to understand when the images have been accurately labelled and assigned beforehand.

Incentivized

We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky

Incentivized

They really are very different platforms. MediaValet offers much more control over who has access to files and how they are downloaded, as well as offering conversions of some files such as JPEG to PNG or TIFF. Also, through user profiles, you can grant access to a specific path to some users and not others, so it has a lot of customization. The other platforms are just for storage and sharing but there is no user control.

Incentivized

• Allows quick and easy image and asset searches.
• Has been an invaluable tool for our organization by freeing up database employees to tackle other tasks.

Incentivized

• Easier to send specific files to other people
• Can combine different assets in an aesthetically pleasing website like platform with Portals to present
• Gives peace of mind knowing that our files could be deleted from our system, but MediaValet has the backup

Incentivized