Cumulus by Canto Reviews

Canto's Cumulus software has been a wonderful tool for storing and retrieving digital assets. I began as an Archivist with a group who was already using the software, but had not really taken much time to learn what it can do. That was my job. Almost immediately I hit the ground running, and I could not be happier with Cumulus as a tool. It is incredibly customizable, and you can manipulate the software to do pretty much anything digital assets management might require. That might be it's only downside too: The software is so customizable that it may take a little bit f tinkering to get things exactly the way you want them, but their training staff do an excellent job of making sure the users aren't lost in a sea of options. They do a wonderful job of helping you customize the software to make it work for you. I sleep well at night knowing that Cumulus is storing our digital assets, and I do not worry about data loss. Cumulus is digital assets management at its finest.

That might be it's only downside too: The software is so customizable that it may take a little bit of tinkering to get things exactly the way you want them, but their training staff do an excellent job of making sure the users aren't lost in a sea of options. They do a wonderful job of helping you customize the software to make it work for you. I sleep well at night knowing that Cumulus is storing our digital assets, and I do not worry about data loss. Cumulus is digital assets management at its finest.

If you need to organize your Digital Assets, Canto Cumulus is the way to go. You can do almost anything imaginable with your assets, and if you imagine something new, they will implement it!

I have been tasked at creating a central location for the art editors to store and retrieve the images they use. Cumulus is amazing at this because of the several different ways they can find their images and isolate the ones they are looking for.

Cumulus is used at my media publication company for easy storage of multimedia components ranging from JPEGS to Adobe CC files. The storage capabilities are astronomical, which is an obvious selling point, and it allows one to see variations of the same file that can all be stored for records, easy access, out-of-office accessibility, and most importantly, metadata indexing (which has its drawbacks, see "dislikes").

At the end of the day, it gets the job done, but it is not easy to (a) learn how to navigate, nor (b) avoid glitches in execution. There are multiple ways to accomplish a given task, like search for a file via keywords established at time of uploading with metadata indexing. However, there are such a plethora of options when searching that in many cases it actually makes it MORE difficult to find what you are looking for!

Obviously in a newspaper/publication setting, the purpose of a program like Cumulus is record-keeping, in a manner that makes a massive volume of information accessible to multiple parties from any given device or location. I cannot speak for the mobile access of these records, but for an office like ours where branches and offices are scattered across a region, this program has certainly proved beneficial in keeping records and files consistent and accessible.

Cumulus is so easy to use, love the palette mode for use with InDesign. The ability to add extensive and custom asset metadata for robust search functionality is fantastic. Once I've found what I need the cart makes gathering and downloading or emailing the assets I need efficient. Uploading is a breeze as well.

There's not much I dislike, the main issue I have is not being able to overwrite an asset easily. We have multiple people uploading images and if they don't search first to see if it's already in Cumulus we end up with duplicates on our server taking up valuable space. Seems like recognizing a file name and giving you an alert to ask if you want to load another version would be pretty basic functionality.

Consider not just your current business environment but where you'll think and want to be in 5 years when migrating to Cumulus and determining how to organize and assign metadata to your assets and catalogs.

We use Cumulus to store and organize all of our image assets. It allows us to easily manage, categorize, search and access those assets for use across multiple marketing channels. It's made locating images much faster than our previous system increasing our overall production and design efficiency.

The Web Client is a smart, intuitive tool that allows our team to communicate effectively and streamline our process. Version history, sharing links to personalized collections of assets, quick and easy commenting, custom fields that allow high level organization, and various format downloading (specifically for photos) are some of my favorite features.

The admin role is difficult to learn for an average user. I came with no experience with DAM other than working from a designer perspective. This is similar to walking into another country with zero grasp of the language other than how to order a beer. Thankfully the customer service team at Cumulus is very willing to help you learn the ins and outs.

If using this software for large InDesign files, be aware that the linking process can be tricky. Sitting down with a specialist from the Canto team will be worth the time spent to get the details sorted out.

We are reducing errors in a big way by being able to track multiple versions of our products. Even though we have regular back ups to our server, this didn't allow for the flexibility we now have by seeing multiple versions with comments and users explaining each and every change. Quick searching also speeds up our process big time.

Cumulus provides a huge collection of filters to handle media files natively. So are fine with photographers sending us material in RAW formats.

The web interface became very powerful over the last years and helps us to work with external partners - even when digital assets are huge in files size or its content is confidential.

In the first versions (10.0.3) it was really complicated to implement a SSL certificate to use with Cumulus' tomcat webserver.

When the iOS apps did not support SSL connections to our catalogue server we could use apps only via VPN.

Our decision was made after we compared the interfaces that are provieded to access data from the catalogue by external applications.

Cumulus offers APIs / webservices and is able to mirror the database to a second SQL-Server. This helped us a lot.

We managed to find our digital assets that were spread across different fileservers and very hard to overlook before we put them in cumulus.

Using and developing a scheme for meta data helps us to perform workflows based on our DAM database.

After nearly two years of using the software i can say that this DAM fits perfect to our needs. The migration of the old DAM system was accompanied by Canto very professional. The handling of more than 200k of highres assets in several portals is fast and easy. Managing the files with the native or web client is fast and intuitive. Working together with the guys from Canto showed us how close they are to their product. Customized features like an InDesign package download were no problem. The good integration of the software into InDesign was one main reason for the purchase. Using the system as a distribution platform and a collaboration platform helps us a lot to do our work in a very effective way. Until now a very reliable system.

Due to the versatile possibilities the software offers, sometimes the handling seems a bit complex.

Migration and setup of a new system should be done very close with Canto. Take your time for the first setup.

Using the system as a distribution platform and a collaboration platform helps us a lot to do our work in a very effective way. Until now a very reliable system. Distributing our Marketing Materials with a Sites portal based on Cumulus saves a lot of costs. Updating documents is fast and easy.

The software is highly configurable, so I can customize it to meet the specific needs of our workflow, and the company, Canto, has been very dedicated in ensuring that we get the most out of the product, by resolving any questions, issues, or configurations in an efficient manner.

Although the product is feature-rich, some of the nicer features; versioning, the adobe drive integration, are only available if you are capable and interested in utilizing a central asset location.

Canto has worked hard to improve and expand their API making it a must-have for companies looking to integrate their DAM solution with their existing systems.

We have 300,000+ Illustrator files and growing. Cumulus has given us unprecedented access to all of our old assets, and given us the tools to search for them and through them for highly specific content. Ultimately that has increased our productivity and made us far more efficient.

The flexibility of deployment and implementation was paramount for our organization, as we ended up hosting the solution on premise due to our large file sizes. We love how the metadata is written back to the asset. Additionally, the various ways to access the assets through the web, through apps or through a desktop client made the user adoption go very smoothly.

Customizing the software during the installation and implementation phase was more time consuming than we had anticipated and with the new releases of software and portals we have encountered some delays and hiccups (we are working through them). Out of the "box" reporting is significantly lacking compared to the other options, but you can buy a 3rd party addin for that.

Be sure to map out your expectations very clearly and ask a lot of questions prior to implementation. Try to think of all the use case scenarios and ask how the solution would address them.

The visibility on where are assets have gone and where they are going is greatly increased, in addition to increasing the visibility of knowing what assets we have while enabling a strong search functionality has decreased duplication of assets and increased productivity and efficiency.

I mostly like the history of the assets - you can see who made changes and go back to older versions. Although you get notifications if someone else works on a assets you want to check out. The search is really complex so you are able to find the things you are looking for - if the assets are tagged correctly.

Unfortunately we often have Cumulus Server problems: Sometimes it is slow, other days you can not access any assets because the connection failes or other problems occure.

I am working as a Webdesigner. Instead of having many files for one project, we now have one asset to work on. When the work ist done everyone is checking their assets in Cumulus - so everyone has access to them.

I like that Cumulus has been around for so long and the product continues to evolve and maintain the support team. It is a stable solution that does what we need it to do to help manage assets. There are a lot of features that we do not use but are there when we would like to use them without having to call for custom development.

It is not easy to extract data out of Cumulus or import data into Cumulus from other systems. There are a lot of features that without proper training and support will not get utilized.

We were simply trying to solve the location of assets within our marketing and product efforts along with categorizing our assets and having a simple way to search for them.

Cumulus has been an amazing product and has really developed over the years to be both initiative and easy to use. The management of assets is so important and is usually an afterthought. We have been using Canto for many years and have recently started to offer it to our clients and they are truly amazed.

There is not much, not to like! This is an amazing product and offers a lot to love.

If your business has a number of products or does a lot of marketing, this product might be just right for you.

Being able to offer amazing and quick access to approved assets. Working with file formats, file sizes and being able to send to clients for quick review

We love it's ease of use once it's all set up and running. we have roughly 60,000 images in our database which we use to create ad materials for our regional supermarket chain in the northeast.

Some of the preferences settings require a little digging to get to. the GUI could use some tweaks. but once you find what you are looking for, it's good to go.

We are constantly challenged with a ever growing workflow of images that need to available advertising and also current with packaging. Designers need quick access and power search options to find what they are looking for. we are looking to expand our use of meta data for all of our assets as well as UPC tracking.

The possibility to customize the catalogs, especially while working in a big company. You can decide who can use your catalog or what they can see. No need for external file transfers like wetransfer or dropbox, just send a link via cumulus with no data restrictions.

The structure / workflow is basically like the structure on your computer, you add folders, subfolders or just delete them. Drag and drop your content - there you go everything is up.

Big dislike is the instability if you have a huge catalog (which is the case while working as an advertisement photographer) cumulus is getting very slow then, or even breaks down. Currently the workaround will be every year another catalog.

If you have a lot of clients or internal work with individual data sharing - go for cumulus!

The internal sharing ability, instead of copying files into 1000 places, you just upload it to cumulus and give everyone access who needs access. Or vice versa, you don't want the data to be shared anymore, just restrict it.

We´ve been using cumulus from canto since ... 4 years in our campany. The time before the organisation of our marketing material was not ideal. It was a problem to exchange data from division to division (national and international) - we used memory sticks or hard disks. For me as a windows user it was impossible to exchange data with a mac user - because we did not use the same network. Data was outworn and there was no version control or right system. Since we use cumulus this belongs to the past! The software is extremely costumizable and canto reacts very fast and professionel to our needs. We`ve created wonderful processes - for example between cumulus and jira (a bug- und issue-tracking-system from atlassian software) - for example between our online marketing and graphic design divisions for the creation of web pages or newsletter. I can count a lot of examples :) !!!

We use cumulus in processes with external partners like design agencys, freelancer and photographers. They use the improved webclient. Since we use cumulus we have access to data from everywhere - this is a great advantage. We love the search function based on key words (in any language).

Cumulus will be permanently enhanced - the version 9.1 has a great adobe integration. A lot of people in my company use the batch processing function. Also the comment function is a great advantage.

We daily use it and we love it. It has improved our work!

There is nothing I dislike. Sometimes external partners have problems to use the webclient - but I think this belongs to the exoerience and software affinity of the user.

You will not make a mistake by using cumulus!

see below

Experience: Cumulus offers a great product to manage all the assets we have here in the company. You cn store, share, modify, optimize assets (e.g. pictures, videos, documents) and also use these asets in other applications without storing it twice. It really helps us to manage the assets itself and also their meta data, digital rights and so on.

Absolutely recommendable and a must have!

Due to the fact, that Cumulus offers a solution to manage a lot of assets it is necessary to focus on the main process first and increase the solution step by step. In the first days it is sometimes a plethora of features an possibilities. But the consultants of Canto could help here perfectly.

We had a lot of assets (pictures, videos) inside the company - most of them were stored twice or more on different places. Even a customer requested such an assets it was a long way to send it to the customer - and even had to send the asset itself and not only a link or something like that.

Wir nutzen die Bilddatenbank von Canto Cumulus seit gut einem Jahr und konnten dadurch endlich Ordnung in unser riesiges Bildarchiv bringen. Die Auffindbarkeit der Bilder ist sehr viel besser als früher. Auch ist es ohne Probleme möglich, alle relevanten Informationen zum Bild (Fotograf, Aufnahmedatum, rechtliche Einschränkungen, Freigaben, Sperrfristen etc.) mit zu hinterlegen.

Wir sind mit dem Programm insgesamt sehr zufrieden. Mit dem Kundenservice hatten wir allerdings etwas Pech. Es gab viele Personalwechsel, so dass wir immer wieder unseren Ansprechpartner verloren haben. Dadurch sind uns einige Zusatzkosten entstanden, weil besprochene Anpassungen nicht umgesetzt wurden, dann vom Nachfolger in Angriff genommen werden mussten, der wiederum einige Dinge zurückgesetzt hat, die wir vorher haben anpassen lassen, was dann wieder rückgängig gemacht werden musste.

Etwas irritierend fand ich auch, dass man im Rahmen der Verkaufsgespräche eine Datenbank vorgestellt bekommt, die quasi alles kann. Wenn man Canto Cumulus dann kauft, ist die Datenbank aber komplett blank und alle gewünschten Features müssen erst eingerichtet werden, was den Kunden eine Stange Geld kostet. Eine Grundausstattung mit den klassischen Feldern (Fotograf, Stichwort, Aufnahedatum etc.) und einer Doublettenkontrolle wäre schön, für alle Beteiligten einfacher und vor allem auch kostengünstiger.

Ordnung in eine bislang sehr unübersichtlichen Bilderflut zu bringen.

The system is not "heavy" on the infrastructure -it works how you would hope asset management would work. On a few occasions, we have needed to reach out to support for help and they were everything you could hope for. In one instance, my client was not sure if they still had a support contract, but they also had an issue causing some business impact. Due to some turnover and changing of rolls, my client could not find the correct ownership information either.

Canto support helped get my client their historical invoices, get them back on a support contract, and help solve the problem. It's important to note: support helped me solve the problem, before my client paid the invoice on the contract. I really thought that was impressive, that Canto recognized the severity of the situation, and was willing to help, when they were perfectly within the right to not help.

So far we have not had any internal issues or complaints!

After getting the old system upgraded, my client was able to offload some of the work the creative team previously did, to an account services team. That team was able to fulfill client requests for images without getting the creative group involved. It helped speed the responses to clients and vendors as well as balance the workload.

I like that it is so easy to use. Everyone in our marketing department uses it. Customer support is very friendly and helpful. I've researched other data asset management software and haven't found anything else that compares.

Just that we are in different parts of the US, so the timezones are a factor in getting in contact with someone during the hours that I am at the office.

We can easily locate all versions of photographs that we have taken based on our keywords. I can easily update photos by the click of a button.

I like all the search options -- by title, by category, by keyword, etc. I like having our photos and pages archived in one spot.

I wish you could blow up a photo by double-clicking -- right now it doesn't get that big, and you're forced to download it to see it in detail.

We do a lot of photo tagging -- tagging by location, by person, etc. -- and all of these tags are searchable in Cumulus. This is really important, as I am often looking for a very specific photo.

Performance. Cumulus is able to deal with more than 100.000 digital assets without any problems in a daily-use environment.

System

Roadmap. Upcoming and eliminated features are not really communicated.

Complexity. The system is very powerful but not easy to set up. You will need a consultant to get it running, as there are not preconfigured environments.

Before buying Cumulus, think about your use-cases and let canto demonstrate them!

cumulus is used for handling all digital assets. It replaced Adobe Bridge, that was used before and gives much more options and speed in organizing data the way you want it.

Version control and Portals guarantee that users have the most current version of the file they are downloading. This allows us to spend less time cross-checking files to make sure its the current version and more time doing work that actually needs to be done.

Unlike the front-end, the back-end is not user friendly or intuitive without previous experience or training. Once you have a good grasp of the back-end everything is much, much easier to accomplish.

Pros: Very powerful, is able to manage all of our typical files, Portals is a great way to share curated images and PDFs within our organization, Version control is a life saver

Cons: A few issues after upgrading to Cumulus X from Cumulus 9

Overall, Cumulus is a powerful tool for our us to curate and distribute files within our organization. With multiple thousands of photos in our archive we need a simple, fast way keep files up to date and guarantee that people have access to the most current version. Cumulus fits that bill perfectly.

We use Cumulus to curate our photo archive, push out updated documents to coworkers, and archive final design files from the design team.

Keeping downloadable files up to date has been a great benefit of using Cumulus and Portals. Versioning has allowed us to update files quickly and easily without the need to delete old files, allowing us to guarantee that everyone is downloading the most up to date version.

It's basic and easy to edit large groups of images. Uploading is easy but you still have to have the files saved to your drives which use alot of space (at least in the version we use). I do like the search option and if you do a good job tagging items works great.

Again, in the version we use you still have to have the space to save the photos. Also, newer applications allow you to send links that they can see images but not use.

Great way to store and search a large photo database but sharing and downloading images is a minus.

Great way to organize a large image database. Using the search can bring up photos that you may not know you even had. Gives you lots of options.

The Asset Organisation and history viewing option. Its a good piece of software to work with in Teams.

THere are minor bugs, that will crash cumulus from time to time. Or it's very slow at loading different assets or open catalogues.

Its a good solution to share and edit files within more people, but sometimes there are some bugs that will slow down cumulus or it needed to be forced to shut.

We are working with cumulus to organize, edit and share graphic relevant files.

Cumulus is great to organize, share and work with big data sets in bigger companies and with different business partners.

Long loading time and sometimes the web client is not reachable or rather download links don’t work

If you have to work together with a lot of people/colleagues/business partners and need to share and edit big data files, Cumulus is a great product.

In our company we use Cumulus to edit, organize and share data sets/graphic assets with our colleagues and trading partners

searching metadata

fits our workflow

easy to use

time saver finding images

I have an older version with only one license. I would much rather have the newer version with web interface.

Cumulus is a leader in DAM. Managing permissions and copyrights is so important for our company. Cumulus allows us to eliminate getting sued (which has happened) a concern for us to deal with.

Finding assets quickly

Managing permissions and usage

Preventing miss use of copyrighted images

We have tried other solutions in the past, but moving to this product has made the job of organizing, searching and using thousands of images for hundreds of clients a breeze.

The interface could be made a bit friendlier and the documentation for the API service is lacking.

I would recommend this product

We need to manage images uploaded by hundreds of clients and we have been looking for the solution that would make such management easy and streamlined, while it would allow us to integrate it into our own multi-part solution. Cumulus allowed us to do that and enabled us to automate a lot of the manual workflows we had at the time.

Everything about using Cumulus is easy for myself and my clients, from managing roboflow, to setting up and maintaining catalogs; cumulus was designed brilliantly with the end-user in mind.

There are certainly a few hurdles with getting cumulus' back-end systems lined up to work for the users. Some tweaking is necessary, which can be a little intimidating if you have not worked in cms before, but their support is top-notch and has your back to get cumulus up and running for you and your team.

Cumulus has streamlined the cms experience for my staff, and enabled a smoother and more effective means to manage all our company's digital content. Cumulus has robust options for my team to use for ingesting and managing all of our digital assets; the Swiss Army knife of CMS.

I like the fact that I can catalog a multitude of assets of varying sorts across multiple folder structures and servers then easily locate them without wandering blindly through the asset terrain. I also like that I can apply a multitude of categories to assets (if I want) making them even easier to locate in a comprehensive way which a folder structure and/or naming convention will not allow. I also like that I can deliver one asset in multiple sizes, color spaces, resolutions and with specific or generic watermarks without needing to maintain a bucket of all these possibilities in the asset server space.

Some of the functionality, such as watermarking, is limited awkward and clunky. I often find myself needing to create complex actions in order to accomplish something that I think is fairly logical straightforward and simple using these interfaces. I also dread updates because as a longtime user, our catalogs seem to become very buggy when upgraded to whatever the latest version happens to be. We have a support contract with Canto and unfortunately their customer service leaves much to be desired. If you're okay being entirely on your own with software, so much the better because Canto does not do a good job of supporting their customer base.

One of the primary problems being solved is redundancy. While it seems that wasting server space with multiple asset forms and sizes is almost inevitable, Cumulus has allowed us to have multiple "master" asset stores which are mostly uncluttered with bags of redundancy. This is also important because many of our users need to provide one set of assets in multiple varying forms and resolutions, which Cumulus easily accomplishes without a lot of struggle. One of the best things about Cumulus with regard to the benefits is through naming coventions and folder structures combined with the software, our legacy files are complete, well organized and easily accessible even after they've been removed to storage media.

I find the presentation of the web portal to be clean and useful, allowing easy navigation through historical image repositories we think this would be a good system for many companies that use the tool as an end location to store final copies and could use a pretty web interface to interact with the system

I find the scalability to be lacking, the over all API is very limited unless done through a Canto partner, and more directly the overall file system interaction/usage is pretty bad. Our overall experience has not been good, the customer service leaves everything to be desired, the documentation around the API and interfaces is very poorly done and is deliberately incomplete to require the use of partners to develop or engage your external systems to canto for integrations and such.

We were attempting to solve a image repository issue, but the tool lacks the integration abilities to enable usefulness to us, we will probably not use it much longer. We do not think it will add enough value for the pain of integration into our other applications in our environment, but are still looking at file manager and robo flow to see if there is any way we could save the product in our environment.

I can upload my work to the cloud for future reference.

Uploading to cumulus takes forever. It can break in the process and not finish without letting you know. it logs me out continually. It does not allow you to have folders to separate huge quantities of files within a job. You have upload size limits. You can't upload the same file used in two projects, so you have to zip all files in case the file/image has been used by someone else elsewhere in the cumulus jobs. I'm sure there are even more I'm forgetting.

We are solving the problem of cloud storage and archival of our work to track and find previous jobs to make new versions or additional work from old ones.

Cumulus lets us link our Graphic designers, photographers, and other users easily. We use it to categorize our assets and keyword them to our standards so they are searchable.

Interface takes some time to get used to. There are many keyboard shortcuts worth learning.

We had the problem of categorizing our assets. Cumulus let us use specific keywords that could be used company wide to help sort and find files.

While the interface is effective, what I like best is the search performance we get with Cumulus. Over 150,000 assets and growing... not a sign of any performance problems.

The interface is rich and can be complex to first learn. But like any product that works well, once you figure it out, it is at your service.

If Cumulus does what you need, it is a good buy. We are very happy.

We were using another company's DAM and the search performance was killing us. We needed to continue to provide asset management but with a tool that could scale and manage the number of records we were throwing at it. So far (two plus years), Cumulus has been up to the challenge.

Cumulus is a fantastic product that makes my job considerably easier and faster! It saves so much time in searching though thousands of images. We as a museum can spend so much time, days really, searching though images folder by folder in out photography department, it is extremely time consuming. With cumulus you can search through categories and dates. For annual reports, that is key. You can also type in the name or part of a name and it comes up so fast. I would never want do my job with out it, much less go back to the old way!

I would make the images bigger for review.

you get what you pay for, invest in quality and you will get quality back!

saves time and money, when you are none profit, that is huge!

As the server administrator and escalation point for Cumulus, I appreciate that its web front-end (based on Tomcat) is simple to integrate with our LAMP / Apache based infrastructure. By default, everything is stored in the filesystem, making for easy backups / reversions. And unlike many such solutions, the installer and tools are command-line friendly, which works well for our linux-based server environment. No fighting my way through a bad GUI installer that was knocked-off from a windows installer.

Customizing the system side of thing (such as logging, tomcat log rotation, integration with apache, etc) can be daunting if you don't have previous Cumulus and/or LAMP experience. Canto tech support is quickly helpful in resolving such issues.

Consider whether your users will be mostly web-based or desktop-based (client).

The primary goal was to get a number of communications specialists across various units to start sharing their digital assets, and particularly stop storing them on their personal systems in a haphazard manner. For that goal, a managed central repository with meaningful tagging and organizing, Cumulus has worked very well.

I like how flexible the system is overall and how much fine-grained control it gives you over virtually anything. This can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking to do with it.

It is very confusing to use and many of the features don't seem to work unless you have configured something elsewhere. Confusing schema in general.

Get connected with one of their team members and be ready to go through several training sessions before gaining an understanding of how to use it.

Media cataloging, CDN

Incredibly powerful, highly customizable, able to ingest practically any format and know what to do with it. It's ability to use metadata intelligently - and be used for ever more possibly formulas via customization - is excellent. If you and your team can clearly form a vision of what they want from a DAM, Cumulus can be created to do just that. It can hook into any data location, it has a good notion of where things should be stored media wise and database wise.

The learning curve is not for the faint of heart, and with power comes some kludginess. It's necessary; if you want flexibility, something's gotta give and if you want to keep getting more from it, you'll need to learn how to use it. More than anything - if the program isn't doing what you want it to, it's most likely because you haven't learned it. That being said, if it weren't for there very capable tech team, most of the program's power would be hidden behind some very intricate processes.

Be sure to check your server capabilities and the protocols it uses to ensure your IT admins are comfortable with how cumulus hooks into the network. And be prepared for a steep learning curve. 5 plus years on, and everytime I'm looking for more power, it's there but you need to check all your i's and t's.

A central location for our media - photos, audio, video, you name it. The more familiar I become with the program, the better it becomes and the more our company uses it. It's a great loop, and we are seeing better efficiency.

The program is great for organizing a large amount of files. I use it at work to store images. You can add comments and notes to files and provide a good amount of information. It's a really easy way to share files with a whole company.

I find the program to be a little tricky to get the hang of. I wasn't really trained on it, so I had to figure it out on my own. It's not too hard, but it does take some tinkering.

We are able to store files in one place and conveniently locate them. We also can keep notes on files so we dont use them multiple times.

how it was able to ingest all of our pictures and then allow us to organize and search for them

it was a good product and not much i dislike. when we first starting using it 5+ years ago it was clunky and difficult to navigate. the more current version are much more streamlined.

it is a product that has served us well. it gets used primarily by one department to organize the bulk of photos they have and they are able to use and enjoy using it.

it has helped us organize and search for photos.

We aren't using most of the features for this product, but one that we use alot would be the metadata. That is one of the most useful features for this version b/c any field can be made searchable. We've customized most of these fields and the data shown on preview screens to show our custom data.

Web client is also useful since it helps you limit access to groups within the business without needing to install a new desktop client for that user.

Also the client user interface has been improved a bit from the previous version.

The 8.6 version doesn't integrate well with Adobe Indesign in terms of image links from Indesign documents. Within the sites web client interface, it seems complex to customize any of the pages. ( i'm wasn't that familiar with .jsp pages when implementing) .We started with v7 and we are probably still using some features from that version b/c of this. For example i wasn't able to add custom metadata fields to a page using the "sites" UI but was able to do it in earlier versions.

If you have an IIS background make sure to consult with canto when setting up the web client on your servers. It uses an apache web server.

When we moved away from our legacy digital photo management system we needed a robust asset management software in its place. Cumulus can do alot more that what we are using it for , but for our purpose it does its job.

I like that Cumulus can manage so many different assets in various catalogs on cross platforms. Our environment has both Mac and PC's and there is very little interference from the O/S's conflicting with Cumulus. This was a big plus when deciding to go with the Canto product. The software is stable; metadata is captured on the fly and more can be customized to suit our needs. If there's a problem, Canto tech support does a really good job of helping to resolve all issues until they're resolved.

The program is so vast that even though I've been working with it for years, there are things about it I don't know and I'm still learning about. Unique paths for each record tend to be tricky to work with so moving records (if the business need demands it) can be more involved. The Tomcat server software is sometimes unstable

The Canto product is very versatile so DAM can be a reality for business needs both small to large. The staff at Canto are very easy to work with and can help identify business needs quickly based on their experience and product development over the years. I like that the product doesn't change its character too much from version to version, in that it becomes complicated to learn a lot of "new features"; it instead capitalizes on product improvements that come from the customers they work with. I highly recommend the product.

We asked Canto to custom design our online photo library interface to a new style that is clean and intuitive for our users using the Canto Sites product.

The organisation of our assets within the company, the possibility to share data and the search functionality.

Sometimes it's quite slow or even not responding. Would be great, if stability can be assured.

Organize, edit and share graphic assets within different departments in our company.

Unfortunately only connected with an "if": the versioning. She once needed, but she did not work. If it works, it would be great.

The massive irregularities in the attainability. Often the server is not reachable, or the client crashes.

Graphic design and development.

It makes searching though our 72,000+ a breeze. It is so much faster than trying to find it manual in folders on the server. We build grocery ads with hundreds of images in each ad each week. It is a huge time saver, which is a money saver.

Currently we are not posting our cumulus to the web so our freelancers are not able to access it, but we are working on that. It is possible.

Cumulus helps us keep our ad image up to date because once we archive the new and delete the old everyone building ads with cumulus has the current images in their ad. Versus those who are building ads off what the have on their own computer with images they have saved may not know that there are new images out there to replace what they have. Then they run the old images and that makes the manufactures angry.

As a designer at a Natural History Museum, we have a lot going on - historical and biological collections, education events, and much more. Our organization of images before integrating Cumulus into our workflow was challenging at best. Now we have the flexibility we need to get our work done efficiently. Overall very glad we're using this system!

If I could recommend improvements, I would want the search function to be slightly more intuitive. Its no trouble now, but there was a learning curve involve. Would also like to see preview images be slightly larger.

We needed to take an exponentially growing database of images with a wide variety of uses and make it easy to find what we needed.

As the Cumulus administrator, I love the control that I have over a users permissions and access they have to various catalogs. I can quickly and easily create new users, or modify an existing user profile. This is extremely important due to the fast paced nature of our work.

At times, I can feel overwhelmed at the immense capabilities of what Cumulus has to offer, though I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not. That being said, the support services provided are extremely helpful, and I find it very easy to get help whenever it's needed.

With over a half a million assets, and growing each day, we would not be able to do our jobs without Cumulus. The tools contained within the Cumulus software greatly increase our productivity and accuracy.

I like how malleable the program is and that it offers us an option to house assets in-house and also access them via online services. We can program and add fields as we grow our metadata needs, and the program allows for the most file types of them all.

I wish more scripts were available from Canto. We hired OTEC to create custom scripts for us which have reduced asset management time considerably.

This holds more data for less money than other products on the market.

We are solving multi-channel use for our image assets, logos, and videos. Cumulus offers a platform to be able to easily collaborate with multiple departments, and now that it is compatible with Sitecore, it has become a perfect fit for our marketing and branding teams.

The photography office at the museum purchased Cumulus to solve the problem of sharing our images internally with others in the museum in a way that was easy for the staff access and use. Cumulus also allowed for the photo office to control how those images were used which was a great benefit to us in maintaining control over our images.

The photo office doesn't have any real dislikes with Canto, since it allows us to control who sees our images and what they can do with our images

After doing our homework Canto was the best fit for our needs.

We are solving the problem of sharing and access to images that otherwise would remain unseen and unused, which created the benefit of having our work used for many different reasons and also having a larger number of staff getting access to view our image database.

For our agency, we were searching for a DAM. After filtering the products, which were highlighted by google, our decision was the DAM from Canto. Honestly it was as good as the reviews in the internet. The features are really great und the use is also easy.

For problems, the support is very helpfully.

There are no points at the moment. I gues, most points you may dislike are the missing knowledge.

Just a DAM

Easy to add assets and tag with meaningful meta data. Version control and approval processes make managing many contributors a breeze.

Lacks integration with Adobe software. Would be nice if it intergrated like adobe cloud libraries.

A great solution if you need a robust DAM.

We are now able to share assets quickly across our global companies. Less emailing files over and over.

The programm is absolutaly easy to use. Also colleagues who basically not using this kind of "online" plattforms are very satisfied by working with Cumulus.

To be honest I don't see a point to improve because Cumulus provides all opportunites which we need in our daily work.

Few years ago I was charged to find a easy platform for sharing Pictures for reasonable Price. After a research I advised Cumulus to my boss. Today we're working since three years with Cumulus. All the problems with emails with big data size are solved. Also the data storage in CD-ROMs.

The key wording and user interface are great. It helps us to manage a very robust photography library within a large, geographically diverse group very well.

Over the years, it has seemed to operate slow at times, but that could be a connectivity issue. It does seem a little buggy though.

Participate in a trial. It will be clear quickly how much improved Cumulus can make the management of your assets.

Before Cumulus, our Marketing Communications Graphic Designers maintained images/photography within an internal shared folder. Storage became an issue. Searching became an issue due to inconsistent naming convention and lack of key wording. And there was no way to track easily when images were expiring. Cumulus changes all of that with the increased organization of meta data and consistency in organization.

It makes my life as a designer easy! With our huge image data base, it make every thing a few quick clicks away!

Wish we had it sooner! This is a great tool for any design work flow.

Easy access to all our images and working files. Thank you!

Easy to access archived images. Easy to install and manage as well.

That I have to Mount/Map Drives in order to just drag and drop images from the Cumulus interface to my desktop.

Central Image repository, Easy location for users to pull information and files

The best feature of Cumulus is the vast amount of metadata associated with an asset. The categorization structure makes it easy to apply additional metadata making it easy for any user to retrieve what they are looking for.

My company is currently on an older version and the the interface leaves something to be desired. This looks to be vastly improved in the more current versions.

Review practical user requirements to efficiently structure Cumulus for quick and easy uploading and retrieval. User adoption is key.

We are constantly trying to solve the problem of centralizing the firms digital assets from across the globe. Licensing and use requirements are also a big challenge. Cumulus has helped us centralize various asset types in one location with a consistent set of metadata.

Canto Cumulus provides a feature-rich asset management tool set. Configuration is straightforward and well-documented. Support is responsive and professional.

In our environment assets occasionally need to be moved or are inadvertently moved by users. The path syntax required when relocating orphaned assets in the catalogs can be a bit cumbersome.

As a large research university we have thousands of new assets created each year. Cumulus has provided a central repository for all assets with the ability to create collections/catalogs based on the needs of users and individual business units.

I love the current interface and the support I have received as I attempt to fully implement this tool. I now feel as if I have a better grasp of its functionality based on the support I have received.

The debate we continue to have surrounds cost and the ROI for this investment.

we have a diverse and logistically challenge workforce that we need to share documentation. This has allowed us to remain in contact and revisions levels remain uncompromised.

That I can easily store, search, sort, track changes and enables me to publish my work with no problem!

It's a little pricey and would have a hard time pitching this to management.

We do not have an LMS currently so I am having to create everything in an excel sheet. I realized that since using this software, I am able to share my files easily and track the changes that are being made to the documents.

Good and easy way to share files with other people.

If you use it for many files, in a large company, it takes a lot of time to upload/ download files.

Good Way to organize and share files.

Sharing files with other companies.

We've been using this product for over five years and it is very stable and flexible solution that we use to store, organize and search thousands of client images.

Based on the current version that we are using API service is a little hard to use.

We have thousands of images that are uploaded by clients and we needed one centralized solution to store them. Ability to search and display results using queries in client image libraries is very flexible.

What I like the most is the support that we get when have questions. Our rep has been amazing in providing us with documentation, demos and guidance of best practices through the whole process.

At times it is challenging to determine how to use filters.

Organization of assets. We have been able to access our image and videos at our fingertips, company wide, rather than painstakingly searching through CDs and hard drives to get the information we need.

I like that this product is scaleable which enables my company to add capabilities as necessary. We use this product for our global website asset management, and the simple fact that most languages are supported in the back-end has increased our content ownership across the world.

Some of the things we would like to do are considered custom, which mandates that we hire an approved vendor (Modula4) to code for us. This is sometimes an inconvenience if Modula4 is backed up with projects. There are not many other vendors that can help us.

Hire more approved vendors for software support.

Problem: The need for global languages to enable users and content owners to obtain full use of the assets. Our industry is very image dominant, and we need to show images at their best.

Benefits: we are able to allow the users to download the assets in the format that works best for their project (various types of resolution). We are also able to tie our assets to our internal Search by color, size, landscape, topic, country, etc. This ability is the second most visited portion of our website so it is very successful.

The community forums are a great resource with lots of helpful users and we've used Pro support services a few times, and the team there is really amazing and great to work with. They took the time to learn our business and how and why we wanted to do something, then came back with a few implementations they could not only put in for us, but train on us thoroughly on using them.

Would definitely recommend.

There is definitely a learning curve getting started, and we are still learning things about the software - features we didn't realize were in there just because we didn't know we were looking for it! However after switching over from Extensis' Portfolio, our Art team wouldn't go back.

We have been using Cumulus at our organization for at least 4 years now, and we use it internally for organizing and cataloging artwork and externally to show customers designs and availability. Its a great tool and we are always finding new ways of expanding its uses.

It stores imagery well, high res images and are easy to download and share

The interface is ugly and not incredibly intuitive. I wish icons and previews were larger

Easy to share images

My favorite feature is the ability to use the same asset management system for layout files AND their associated placed images. The ability to have version control for both makes it a workflow dream come true.

I wish the rest of my company was using this system.

If you have a lot of assets to manage, and need custom access privileges to facilitate sharing across various teams, this is definitely the DAM product for you.

Cumulus provides asset management not only for our own work, but also for tracking rights management of 3rd party files. It also provides a platform for tightly controlled delivery of assets to external stakeholders.

I like that it has the ability to have access limitations on certain folders.

It's a bit on the slower side. I'm not sure I understand the benefits of using this as opposed to an own server.

We are using it as an image storage solution but with many other options out there I'm not really sure how this outweighs the competition.

We can catalog our photos and designer files and find them quickly. Once found we can pull the assets to work with.

We have had some issues with the catalog being corrupt and have had to rebuild the catalog but that usually clear it right up.

Plan out how you want to file your assets and then catalog them through Cumulus. This will allow you the best success for future reference.

We have digital assets on a large server that is not search friendly. Cumulus allowed us to search and pull these assets in a fraction of the time it was taking.

It's easy to use and find the correct images.

It is not easy to extract data out of Cumulus.

We managed our whole image directoy with it. It is very easy for all of us to use the right images

- Fast installation and helpfull Staff

- Great range of features

- Fast & good support

- Powerfull videocloud

- Indesign Client, not working properly until Version 10.xx (10 not testet)

Communication between content marketing and sales

Ability to catalog assets and automatically convert graphical assets into different formats such as different resolution, size, file format, etc. Also, provides a central location where employees onsite or offsite can find the assets they are looking for.

We have dealt with some software bugs. But the new updates have fixed the issues. Plus, their technical support team will work with you to solve the core problem at hand.

Provides a central system for people to access around the world without complicated setup. Also, ;let everyday users to convert the assets to format of their liking.

Cumulus is definitely a powerful digital assets management system.

Several things I like about it:

Drag and drop

Multiple users management

Supports various types of files

Web client is nice and easy to use

A bit complicated for a new user

Sites in web solutions are not very stable

Managing more than 50GB of digital assets, like pictures, PDFs, documents, 3D model files and so on.

Cumulus makes us much easier to manage and categorize those files, and different user can manages different category of files.

The ability to search our large photo library creates great efficiencies for our design staff

We have not been able to upgrade to the latest version due to financial constraints

Efficiency

I like that it has a simple organization system.

The search feature is buggy and the interface is poorly designed. The overall system has frequent crashes, especially when downloading larger files.

It's okay.

We put all of our brand assets on Cumulus and it's great to have the instant sharing feature available to everyone at all locations.

easy to use, many configuration customization possiblities

it's easy to get lost in the countless possibilities.

Digitilization of marketing material for company intranet and internet

It was fairly straight forward and easy dealing with Canto on the implementation of Cumulus. Their consultant knew exactly what needs to be done and guided us throughout the process making the effort seamless. Beside the seamless implementation, Canto were also very flexible and easy to deal with before during the vendor selection process, architecture/design, and pre-implementation phases.

wish it could use ADFS, the "cloud" approach Canto uses isn't exactly a true cloud, it was simply a externally hosted servers in a co-loc, wish it would have been more of a hosted services approach vs just a simple hosted server externally.

digital files are sitting in network storage share drive

How customizable it is. Canto gives you a lot of options for customization. It's a great system to grow into.

The learning curve is a bit steep. It reminds me of Photoshop, a program with a lot of options but a steep learning curve.

Allows us to better manage our image resources and opens up some usage options that previously we weren't able to utilize.

We enjoy the full features of of the cumulus client. Our users love the drag and drop features into InDesign and Quark. Easy access from the web and mobile access. Makes streamlining email and PDF creation a breeze,

the interface is very busy for the client.

Solving how to expand our assets, Cumulus has helped organize and share our assets for our users

Canto offers a lot of tools to manage all creative assets. Cumulus Sites allows your outside vendors and freelancers access to your images and creative files.

This is very powerful software and there is a definite learning curve.

We use Cumulus to manage all of our digital files. These files can be shared with all team members and pulling them is as easy as drag and drop from the Cumulus client interface.