MerlinOne Reviews

Merlin allows us to easily share photo assets with our network of Habitat affiliates in the U.S., and with our national organization offices in more than 70 countries. My favorite tool is the ability to share email previews of contact sheets containing links to directly download images. That gives us the ability to share collections of photos directly with our clients, without having to upload files to Dropbox. That’s a huge time saver for our team. I also can’t say enough about their amazing customer service. They quickly respond to our questions, and the available training helps us get the most out of the service.

The more I learn about Merlin, the less I see that I would consider a negative. You can credit the customer service team for helping us through anything we don't understand.

When searching for A DAM system, Shriners Childrens needed a system that was HIPAA-compliant and MerlinOne offered this service along with great customer service and efficient communication. The MerlinOne DAM system organizes our companies’ assets in a way that maximizes their value for our brand it allows us to set varying levels of user access for files and folders, and we can easily share files internally and externally with our vendors. A great tool to have on the cloud it has been very valuable during the pandemic as employees started to work remotely, this system allowed us to continue to do our work while having instant access to our assets from any location at any time our teams continued to be efficient while adapting to the virtual working conditions.

The content hubs are a great tool, but it’s still a work in progress and additional features are needed.

Thank you for the positive feedback, Madeline! We are actively working on Content Hubs and appreciate your patience as we continue to develop the feature!

Once you figure it out, the system is very easy to use and retrieve content. Search features are great.

Does not generate permalinks to content/collections; they expire after 24 hours and thus cannot embed content collections on website.

Efforts have been made to compete with the other products out there. Thats apparent. Please continue in this direction. The BIGGEST feedback I got from our users who got a look at Libris.... was how easy it seemed compared to the Merlin interfaces.

Somewhat slow - I know this has been looked into, and also dependent on our internet speed, but we have a very fast connection ... the lags that happen just don't look good to those, who are already not huge fans of Merlin, you may be showing photography assets to etc.

I like the many options available to the user when it comes to customizing the system. I work in the education space and some of the items that we like to tag when saving our digital assets can be very intimately related to our field i.e. students on campus, students in different buildings throughout the school, students wearing branded school gear or just the spaces around the campus to show the school. It's nice that we could build a taxonomy that is specific to us, this makes searching our files easier.

I least like the fact that it can be a bit cumbersome to navigate; sometimes I am uploading hundreds of photos and find that some of the files didn't upload properly - however I have received very good customer service support on this issue which I appreciate.

It is continuously improving, and I believe the staff and their interest in my feedback and recommendations. They really do try to create a product that fits their users' needs. I like that a lot of the features and tools are customizable, and can be enabled or disabled granularly based on user or user group.

It takes a long time to download videos from the software. Managing the multiple user groups can be overwhelming since there are so many that come with the software as a default.

It is easy to train people on Merlin's basic functions, and that's all most of our users need. It's also fairly easy to train power users on most of Merlin's more powerful features.

I still find it difficult to deal with video. I simply can't remember how to output sub-clips. That used to not be too much of a problem, but video is a growing part of my job.

If you can do a Google search, you can search Merlin with little additional training. The interface is very user-friendly, and we have trained multiple staffers with varying levels of computer skills.

Metadata fields are very structured and somewhat limiting. Would like to tailor them more to our needs without incurring back-end programming expenses.

Simple setup for files and metadata, and our librarian can dump content to Merlin in a single system. It's easy to set up and easy to make configuration changes, and the FTP hot folder is trouble free.

No Windows mobile native apps. It would be nice if this was added to the company roadmap. I can't think of a better asset management system and would urge anyone considering purchasing one to absolutely give MerlineOne a try.

We got MerlinONE up and running in a matter of days. No lengthy implementation and a major productivity increase.

Hard to say, any issues we had were quickly ironed out. One very minor thing I would love to see would be more printer template options for printing archived articles. That is a very small thing though, overall MerlinONE was our go-to software when we were up against a tight deadline.

I've been impressed by the amount of customizations you can make in Merlin. Their customer service department has been very helpful when it comes to constricting creative solutions to project management problems and usually responds promptly.

Be prepared to work extensively with their customer support. In my previous DAMs I had much more direct control over field rules, creating new fields, complex user group customization, etc. Merlin customer support has to do all of that for you. While they do usually respond promptly and are helpful, I would much rather do it all myself to avoid errors in communication and delays.

This is a very easy system to use. The documentation is complete and helpful. The support is wonderful and always provides quick, accurate responses.

Some of the date features are frustrating. Primarily how the calendar is displayed as Monday through Sunday, which takes some time getting used to.

I enjoy the diversity of file supported file types and that they are all viewable in the software. It's great for being able to share large quantities high quality photos. The multiple ways you can upload files to the system is great as well. Being able to search by any of the Metadata fields is incredibly useful (date taken, location, creator, subject info). The customer support service is fantastic, they can help with everything you could possibly need. They genuinely want their customers to get the fullest use out of this system.

I wish it had more of a file structure like a hard drive with individual folders instead of being one large mass of photos. If photos are uploaded with incorrect metadata they are very challenging to find. It's not the easiest software to use at first and takes a while to learn. If you aren't accustomed to using metadata in your photos, the initial workload will be huge as this system functions best when using metadata. Thankfully Merlin has amazing customer support that are truly concerned with making sure you learn how to use the system to its fullest potential.

Most liked: 1) Ability to meet our needs for managing our photos in an efficient manner 2) Ability to search for relevant content 3) Support we received from vendor

Least liked: 1) Could have had more training and refresher training for our staff. Initial training was good but we needed more examples of how to use in our environment 3)

The software makes it so easy to go in and search for the assets we're looking for. We're able to bucket our photos into different areas based on the needs of the company, which makes finding what we're after even more effective.

We often have big sets of content to load in batches. Would like to be able to batch load more from the site itself vs. using an FTP for those.

Excellent technical support. Very responsive to customer needs with development. Hosted solution allows us to focus our resources elsewhere.

No cons were added to this review

It's very easy to use and its search engine is terrific.

The new interface is a little hard to navigate and sometimes there are glitches in the functions.

The searchability functions allow me to easily call up assets based a variety of variables. Sending photographs over FTP has been seamless.

The interface is a bit clunky. The edit tool for photograph captions seems like it could be better optimized.

The best part of Merlin one system is the ability to have all of our assets in one place. Our organization is trilled with the results.

The admin aspect is a bit difficult to understand but the customer support is great whenever there is an issue.

The collections and projects areas are great for organizing images. I love how quickly i can go through all may searches.

The auto update is necessary. But if i have it on takes me back to the top my search if im scrolling down.

Its very fast and the layout if decent. The video voice is improving and does a really decent job.

There are really no cons, other than the software can be too complex sometimes, but overally, its fairly easy.

It has plenty of options when it comes to searching, and the search tools are robust. Fairly customizable for both administrators and the users. Has plenty of features for the price. Buying concurrent licenses instead of licenses for every user is a huge plus.

It's not without some quirks and bugs. We've experience some issues loading files into the system, and have gotten bugs when trying to manage keywords. Nothing that breaks the system, but does give users some annoyance.

I love the ease of use and the ability to change image metadata on the fly. The ability to search wire and staff images in one place is also an added bonus.

My least favorite aspect about the software is the download times. There are times when downloads take an incredible amount of time to download. Zip files often break and I have to call customer support to fix it.

We are able to store a large quantity of photos in the database and quickly search for assets. We can categorize the assets into "collections" and link photo assets with consent forms.

We've run into technical glitches with the web upload form and collections tool, and slowness within the platform. The overall management system is not intuitive to use.

No pros were added to this review

No cons were added to this review