Tagging Ecommerce Assets Doesn’t Have to be a Manual Grind
If your team is still manually tagging all your ecommerce assets, there’s a faster, smarter, and more sustainable way to operate.
Those manual methods might have worked back when you were shooting 50-100 products a day and only had a handful of basic attributes to input.
But today, you’re dealing with much higher volumes and significantly more metadata to associate with each asset. You simply won’t have the time to keep up, leading to bottlenecks and lost efficiency.
Leveraging a more automated set-up will remove these restrictions – making tagging faster, more accurate, and scalable to your production needs.
Our resident post-production expert, Thomas, has spent 20+ years helping brands streamline their creative workflows and deliver high-quality visuals at scale. He’s pulled together helpful insights on how top teams are setting up this automation (and how you can too!).
Insights from Thomas💡
Metadata tagging is certainly not the ‘sexiest’ process for most, but it’s a critical backbone for efficient content.
Leveraging clever automation to make high volumes easier to tag will not only minimize manual labor but vastly improve your content’s accuracy, searchability, and overall operational efficiency – helping you do more with less.
If you’re already using a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Platform, some of these automations may already be available to you. Just keep in mind that features can vary quite a bit between platforms, so it’s worth double-checking what’s included in yours.
Even if your DAM offers some solutions, other powerful types of automation can be built outside of it.
Here are proven strategies top brands are using to automate their ecommerce asset workflows:
Use folder structures to auto-tag assets
You can set up hot folders on your server to automatically apply metadata fields like season, shoot name, and category, based on how the folders are named and nested. This is a simple, yet powerful way to reduce manual data input for common attributes and requires relatively minimal development. It ensures consistency from the very first touchpoint.
Pull existing product data
All your core product information – SKUs, color codes, fabrication, sizes, and more – already exists within your internal product design tools, merchandising systems, and/or PIMs. Leverage these existing resources as your starting point. By building simple APIs, you can pull this relevant data directly into your Digital Asset Management (DAM) or photo shoot workflow tool, then layer in shoot-specific details like model info, photographer name, and location. This eliminates redundant data entry and ensures accuracy from the source.
Edit straight from a cloud platform or server
So much time and cost are wasted transferring files via hard drives, which also require shipping and maintenance. Instead, shoot directly to a cloud-based workflow tool or a local server (for in-house studios). This gives your post-production and design teams immediate access to selects, allowing for real-time review and keeping assets flowing with fewer bottlenecks. It significantly accelerates turnaround times and reduces friction.
Let the DAM do the heavy lifting
Once your files are intelligently tagged and in your DAM, the platform can truly become your operational backbone. Use group search and editing techniques to efficiently sort, tag, and assign assets. A well-structured DAM, fed by clean, automated metadata, provides an efficient way to easily share content at scale, ensures robust, accurate search across your ever-growing library, and equips your brand to scale as your content needs evolve over years or even decades.
If these strategies sound like the solution your brand needs, but you’re not sure where to start, VMG can help. From delivering expert retouching support for high-volume content to setting up seamless, scalable workflows, we work with brands to get their content flowing faster and more efficiently.
Whether you’re building a new system from scratch or looking to level up an existing setup, we’ll guide you through the smartest ways to optimize your asset workflows, allowing your team to achieve more with the resources you have.
Ready to explore how your brand can benefit from streamlined content operations? Get in touch – we’re happy to chat.
