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.