How to Manage Your Image Library for Online Marketing Safely

When you run multiple online marketing campaigns, the images you use are important to you. Whether they are brand assets like different versions of your logo and other key imagery, product images you have created yourself, advertising images for specific campaigns, or stock imagery you have purchased (often using a significant amount of your budget), these are really crucial resources.

Because the images you and your team own and work with are so important, it is essential to have policies in place for how they should be stored and shared – and a plan for what to do if images should get lost. Here we look at some of the things you can do to manage your images better:

Use a Good Cloud Storage Platform

One of the first things you need to establish is a good platform where everybody who uses and uploads your marketing images can go. You want this to be a cloud based solution, so that you don”t have to worry about things like backing it up, or having a disaster recovery plan for if anything happens to your own servers. Choose a platform that allows collaboration if you tend to have different people on the team manipulating images and creating new versions of them, so every version of an asset can be accessed quickly and easily when you want to use it in a campaign – whether it is something as major as a new online banner ad, or just a simple tweet!

As well as being collaborative, you also want your chosen platform to allow you to set security levels for folders within your image set. This means you can prevent things you are still working on, or images of products which have not been revealed to the whole team, from being accidentally leaked or used.

Image Source: Pixabay

Keep Images on Local Devices for as Little Time as Possible

While you should make sure cloud storage is where all images that are being used, or which have been archived are kept, it can be hard to avoid some images being on local devices for at least some of the time. Photographs may be kept on cameras, and images manipulated or created on other devices may be held there. Ensure that you enforce a policy of uploading a version of the image in question to the shared repository every time it is saved. This way you will not only prevent the danger of losing images if a device is broken or stolen, but you also allow everybody else access to the newest version of every picture.

Plan for Local Image Loss

Even when people are uploading images as soon as they can, you may still have problems with locally held assets being accidentally deleted or damaged. Ensure you have good, officially licensed photo recovery software that you know how to use, so you can quickly restore any pictures that get lost in this way, where possible.

You can never be too careful when looking after image assets that are key to your marketing, so review your policies today!