Widen Collective Reviews

Ease of use, ease of empowerment for the user. I LOVE being able to share collections with clients. And I LOVE when someone asks for an asset, I just add them as a user on Widen, and tell them to find it themselves!

I'm still waiting for drag and drop functionality with Indesign. A small workflow addition that would make things easier!

Its searchable content. As long as metadata is used, searching for assets is relatively easy.

Upload process. The Drag/Drop feature was nice! Now I'm forced to go through a wizard. Too time consuming for my liking.

Good customer support Robust reporting features Assets can be downloaded in a variety of file formats Various types of file formats are supported Permissions can be setup to protect assets Users can access the site through a standard web browser Media can be built in minutes without needing expensive software programs Assets/media can be ordered and downloaded at any time of day or night Software updates made throughout the year

Pages can be slow to load at times Reporting tools can be confusing Custom enhancements to the site can be expensive Some education is needed for new users of the site The site is not setup for printing on demand Home page can be confusing if your site includes the DAM and the media builder

We love portals! We may be even using them more than intended - we find that portals are the most user-friendly way to surface the right assets to our users!

We do have some features that we'd like improved or added, but Widen is all about customer feedback, so I feel heard when I make new feature requests.

I love that I can easily store all of my content in the system, then make a website like portal to share and organize my content in a neat way.

I wish there was a way to add hyperlinks to Asset Collections so that I can link out to other internal websites within my company or to an eCourse within Workday.

We use Widen as an asset manager, giving our teams easy access to photos, videos, and illustrative elements. As the administrator, I can create different user accounts, letting some people have more access than others if they need it. I can also provide third-party contractors access to our resources too.

The admin side can be a little bit tricky to navigate, and it would be nice as the administrator to be able to change my view settings to spoof different levels of access, so I can quickly see what kinds of access my users have and make changes or alterations without needing to create multiple accounts for myself.

My favorite things about Widen’s DAM software include an easy to navigate interface, very intuitive searching capabilities, customizable metadata fields for great detail to be attributed to assets, the ability to download files in multiple files types (fairly quick conversion depending on size of original file), the ability to customize your login screen and home screen (keeping everything on-brand is important!), and their customer support team is amazing.

I feel that the asset sharing options could be expanded upon. Currently, you can type an email in and send a set of assets. I would like to see additional options implemented because it feels fairly limited currently.

Easy to use. Secure. Excellent support and development teams. Flexibility of features

I could really use the ability to link raw assets with compound documents. This is currently a manual process and time consuming.

Widen was already easy to use, but their improved upload feature has made updating asset metadata much more efficient.

Sometimes when updating individual metadata can be finnicky or time consuming

I like being able to search for multuiple product skus

I would like WIDEN to tell which product MID's are not showing results in a group search

I've used quite a few DAM solutions in the past and Widen is by far the best one I have worked with. The thing that I like the best is the ability to manage the metadata just as easy as it is to manage the assets themselves. On top of that, the ability to assign permissions to access and administer assets by role has proven to be very valuable. We have assets that are only applicable to certain...

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The only thing I have an issue with is my inability to customize the home page. From what I can tell, you have to be pretty savvy at HTML to do it right. But, I can say that there are some basic things that you can customize that will make your page on brand by adding logos and customizing the colors of fonts, buttons, etc.

Assets are served up quickly around the world and it is a very stable platform. When technical issues do arise, they are very communicative about their progress of solving the issue. I like the dedicated customer rep as well as access to new features and feedback through their Trello boards. I also like the ability to extract metadata from image IPTC metadata and map it to our custom fields.

I like the ability to create portals in order to highlight and add info to curated groups of assets, but there are some weaknesses in portal functionality and portal creation capabilities. It would be ideal to be able to create custom dashboards/homepage without extensive use of html. The current wysiwyg is extremely limited in design/layout capability. We'd like a better way for our users to be able to search for portals.

Our DAM houses all of the images we use in our catalogs and online. I love it's ability to organize and tag image in order to search for them with ease.

I think the one thing that I struggle with was the update on how to upload images. My retouch artist and I are usually the main uploads, and we enjoyed the drag and drop feature that used to be on our main page instead of having to click through the Upload Wizard.

The DAM interface is quick and easy to use, the reporting capabilities are robust, and the security allows a lot of flexibility. In addition - we love the Portals - which allows us to provide assets to our non users.

Knowing that a DAM is customized to your company’s needs, I'm not going to lie – implementing a DAM system can be grueling and a lot of work. But that’s the beauty of a DAM – as your company grows, your DAM can also grow and be customized to reflect changes and future needs.

It makes keeping things organized (which is a complicated job) super easy.

It works really, really well, but as with any asset management tool, there is ongoing maintenance and auditing that has to take place. That can get tedious at times, but we realize that it has to be done to keep things current, delete outdated/redundant assets, or just to check things that might have been uploaded with incorrect metadata, for instance.

I love that it is cloud-based and you can access it from any computer, phone or tablet. It's super easy to create collections and share media with internal and external clients.

Some of the features need updating in my opinion. I have asked several times for certain changes that I'm sure I'm not the only one to encounter.

The biggest business problem that it has solved for my company is it allows multiple people to do what once was a one person task. It saves time when being able to have multiple people have access to the same files and being able to send, upload and manage it all. Being able to easily send outside organizations images and documents has saved us so much time and has left very little room for error when sending. With Widen's recent website advancement's, it's given me an opportunity to create a creative brief for projects I'm working on. All within 1 website. It's great.

This doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes I will be uploading files and Widen will time out or freeze during my upload and I'll have to start the process all over. This could be a problem with my internet connection as well.

Widen is a fairly easy and efficient way to store, archive, and distribute photographic files. In the year that I have been using Widen, it has changed the way I work. Now when I receive a request for a specific photo, I don't have to resize it and make sure it is the appropriate size to fit into an email. I just choose the file I want, send it to the recipient and they download it directly from...

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Though I love Widen there have been a few minor issues we have encountered. The first is that it is a little hard to understand at the beginning. The back end of the program seems complicated to a new user. However, we have now figured everything out and so this really is no longer an issue for us. The other issue I sometimes run into is that the processing can be a bit slow. There are times when I upload my files and then cannot see the previews of my files for quite some time. This can be a problem when I am trying to identify people in the photograph to add their names to the keywords. The only way around this currently is to be patient and go work on something else for a while.

The product is easy to use and modify as needed. There are always new updates to the features which makes it even easier to use for my users.

The AEM Integration does not work as it should. This was a big sell for us since our website is hosted by AEM and now we can't integrate the two without AEM working properly with Widen.

I like the ability and flexibility Widen offers to integrate the digital media content with our applications and websites. It also offers nice tools and functionality to add, maintain, organize, and secure content.

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The Media Collective software is easy to use and is easy to configure. If you need some help there is an extensive online help library full of things which can help you, but if you need to talk to someone directly you can web chat, email or call. The help associates are always very friendly and will work with you to understand and fix the issues that you're having.

I guess I don't like the fact that it's not free? I had to put something in this space. If it was free it would definitely be better however that's probably not a sustainable scenario for Widen.

No pros were added to this review

No cons were added to this review

Beauty and brains - the dashboard is legit! You can personalize it to your needs, it's visually appealing without the clutter. The activity feed and the spotlight collection is useful for me and the other admins. Love the idea of the brand portals and can't wait until we can implement and launch it.

As an admin, I'd like to see asset thumbnails in the uploads and downloads tab instead of filenames. Also, the asset versions isn't as easy to use. If we have 3 versions of an asset, I'd love it if when you click on the asset, you can tile the assets to determine which one to download. Currently, you have a "switch version" button that gets lost in the details. Lastly, the batch edit tool sometimes doesn't apply to all assets in the batch.

Speed. Since the beginning we've upload thousands of images and added hundreds of users across our company and partners. It has not slowed down with all of the added weight and burden. It's still as snappy and responsive searching for assets in the beginning. Narrowing the search results and downloading images is very quick.

Support. The support could be better. There has been times, not in a while, when it goes down, just like any cloud service. But it seems the first line of support are the on-site admins. It's a problem when they are not in the office. There's not an easy way to contact support when needed. There should be a chat feature to let them know when we are experiencing outages and get the issues solved.

I have been very pleased with using Widen for our DAM tool. Their support team is phenomenal! Anytime I have a question or issue, they respond immediately and are very helpful to get to the bottom of any issue I might be having, or explain a feature I may not be knowledgeable in. Their entire team is always looking for ways to improve the tool based on user feedback and suggestions. It's great to have...

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My only complaint at this time is that the "Send File" feature has been discontinued with the launch of the new interface. I believe our company may have been one of the few groups that used the tool fairly often, and were sad to see the feature go. We hope to be able to find a solution either with Widen or with an outside service in order to send large files directly to another user without having to have the asset 'live' in the DAM tool.