PhotoShelter for Brands Reviews

We needed to find a way to keep all of our photos safe so we wouldn't lose them in a hard drive crash, flood, or fire, etc. The software does everything that we need it to do— from rating, tagging, storing, and archiving, to sharing light boxes with clients. It is also very affordable.

At first there was a glitch in the way we wanted to share our photos, but Libris' support services worked with us to overcome that problem.

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Offers access to many photos, variable download size options

Search function is horrible (and didn't work at all the first 6 months or so we used the product, so Libris is ridiculously slow at fixing bugs), difficult to find specific images through navigation, multiple clicks required to access search, navigation is not intuitive, images look fuzzy before you download them so you can't tell the quality of the image without downloading it first, lightbox makes you select which box to save to each time, you're unable to put an image into lightbox unless you open the image first, it takes way too many clicks to do anything in this software.

Libris is helping us build and share our Digital images with dozens of clients through out the university. Its easy to share contact sheets, fast download times and very clean and pleasant display of images. Love the ability to customize and use our Logo and color in the main page and use a copy rights watermark. Before Libris, we used to have a DAM that was painfully slow in all aspects. I've recommended Libris to other universities and they are also very pleased with what it offers.

One of the recurring issues that I constantly hear with some of our clients in the University is that sometimes, whey they search images in the library, they are asked to create a login info, and after that, they are told to contact the administrator. Seems there is a glitch in the system and I've contact their costumer service dept. but they still have not been able to fix it. We like the ability to easily download images using a password, but we don't want our clients to created "another" login in account. Makes no sense to have a "search" button if you can download the images you find in your search.

The software reads the embedded IPTC information in each photo. This means when I upload image that have already been captioned and keyworded there is nothing else to do but give access to the images for the customers of the system to find what they need.

The customer side interface assumes a working understanding of using an online visual database. I have talked to the Libris team encouraging them to design a system that their parents or grandparents could use. I think the customer interface assumes at least a 5 level of understanding of the industry on a 10 scale. I want the system to be geared more to a 1, because often those who are assigned to look for images have little or no experience doing so.

The software was relatively easy to set up and maintain.

It would be nice to have some functionality where we could build a collection of images and send that collection link to someone that does not have a Photoshelter login for us.

It saves our team and clients a massive amount of time in the photo search and delivery. It also serves as a portfolio for our photography services.

The Lightboxes are nearly useless and need to be updated to improve viewing, uploading, batch downloading and other options. I'd like to have a few options to customize the preview look. There should be an option to increase the viewing size on previews as clients have a difficult time checking expressions and making selections quickly from a large gallery when the previews are so small.

This software allows you to catalog large quantities of photography and for and additional fee video. The ability for others to view and request photography is great.

Unless you are selling your photography, and even if you are, there are likely much more economically solutions to your needs. We continue to use it due to an agreement we have, but likely would not choose this again if we needed a new solution.

The flexibility and ease of use. I can create and share galleries easily.

Occasionally, the program or site is unresponsive or slow.

Great option for photo storage! easy to use and easy to allow different users different access levels with photo albums.

Uploading and tagging of photos can take some time, it is not easy to do all at once but rather you have to go back and tag

the ability to send photos directly from the database, ease of keywording, very accessible

occasionally it will get lost when going from an expanded view of an image back to the original search. the icon will spin for a long time, until I restart the app (impatience). it would be great if there were a way to see a larger grid view for selecting photos with a client. because it is web based, when our server is having trouble the database is inaccessible. of course, this isn't a problem with libris, but it is an issue that comes up once in a while on my end.

I appreciate the fact that you can have multiple invited users and groups with individualized permissions so that as a creative leader I can limit what other teams are using in their collateral.

It's not as intuitive at first, it took some getting used to as well as communication with the photo shelter team, which was great, to get a better understanding of the ways to use it for our business needs.

The ease of use, the built in FTP and the ability to access anywhere. Being a cloud based system makes it easy for us to transmit, archive or access from anywhere.

I don't have any thing that I don't like about this product. The cost is high, but everything that comes packaged into the product proves that the robust design has been well thought out from the user interface to the admin interface. Libris is build for the professional on the move.

Ability to create lots of galleries and collections to organize. I had years of image collection that I personally was keeping organized, but they were all over. I had a fresh opportunity to newly organize images into categories that make more sense, and get rid of duplicates that were taking up a lot of extra space. The ability to add my own metadata is great, though not sure we're going to be able to afford that option next year. I also like that I can give give full or limited access to team members. Sometimes people only need access to logos, or one area of the companies images. Nice to be able to control that.

Well it's always going to be cost. Especially with add-ons. But we had to bite the bullet and find a safe place for images that can be used and accessed with other co-workers.

The best aspects about Libris are its clean interface and ease of use. It has made my work incredibly more efficient because I am able to quickly search for photos by tags, name, and gallery location, and organize folders to my team's specifications. It was surprisingly easy to learn how to use and the interface is readable and light. Additionally, the Libris team is very helpful and friendly.

There are few things I dislike about this software. If I had to make one suggestion, I wish the software would automatically apply a cover image to folders to make it easier to differentiate them if we have forgotten to apply a cover image manually. I also think there could be some improvement with the Desktop Uploader. The interface is much less clean than the website and sometimes is laggy.

With Libris, we have saved a tremendous amount of time searching for and delivering content to people outside of our team. Many staff members around the world now check Libris first when looking for photos and videos of our athletes, sports and events. If they ask us personally, we send them straight to Libris. The number of direct inquiries from the public have also been reduces. We've been able to use the time saved on other work that needs our attention.

Because only one photo can be downloaded at a time, it can be quite time consuming to download many photos.

Libris and Photoshelter's outward facing interface allowed for the creation of the Cornell Athletics Digital Library, allowing alumni, friends and fans access to this digital repository of Big Red history. Photos can be viewed for free or purchased for posterity. Video clips, game stories, newspaper clippings and more will be available for viewing and downloading. It is both easy to navigate on the front end and simple to manage and search on the back end. it's upload and download time and quick send options also allow us to easily manage our media relations functions.

Batch downloading can sometimes be a challenge when needing things between nested folders, but that's a user problem. Software really has everything we need.

Ease of uploading the photos and tagging the photos. Great amount of customer support to help get us going. It is also evident that they are used to dealing with higher ed clients and had plenty of experience to fall back on when answering our specific questions.

Nothing immediately jumps to mind! It would be great if we could more easily manipulate the order folders (as they default to alpha-numeric ordering), but that feels very nitpicky. All in all, a great product.

It is way to upload images into Libris. I like the fact that you can down load various file sizes and file resolutions. There are lots of metadata options.

The Gallery organization is static. I would prefer to organize the galleries alphabetically, or to group them some other way, while others in our department want to see them chronologically. I haven't found that it is possible to customize in that way. I wish it would ask to name files as they are uploaded so I didn't have to go back and name them after they have been uploaded. AI with face recognition would be an extremely useful addition.

All assets are centrally located. I am able to create folders with links to share to internal and external parties.

Downloading various file sizes is not easy. There should be an easy selection process for the size of photo I would like to download.

I like how user-friendly and intuitive it is.

I wish custom metadata was available for video and that custom metadata fields for pictures supported more than one choice (example: one of our fields is "constituents". Sometimes a picture might have various groups of people captured and we would like to tag all of them.) I also have encountered some glitching when I add a photo from a gallery to another gallery where all galleries seem to duplicate....

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Libris is very easy to use. We use this for photo sharing and organizing, and compared to other products, this seems to be the best at allowing us to customize how we communicate with our clients.

The price is the only thing that would ever make us consider trying another product. With companies tightening their budgets, I could see how this would be a stumbling block for some.

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The searchable database is a huge improvement over our previous solution of hosting photos within folders on a university server.

Would like more storage capacity for a cheaper price in order to store more GIF's, PSD files and videos.

It's easy to set up and the Adobe connector makes it easy to import/tag your photos. The presentation of the galleries is really nice, simple and the customer support for this product is beyond stellar.

Lightbox features in their current form are very underwhelming, but they are getting a facelift at some point. Some features like sending photos or lightboxes to multiple people are not included. Cannot change how the search page looks at all whether you use all of those options to tag your images or not.