Adobe Bridge is a creative digital asset manager that lets you preview, organize, edit, and publish multiple creative assets (including Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, After Effects, and Dimension files) with thumbnails and rich previews.
Edit metadata. Add keywords, labels, and ratings to assets. Organize assets using collections, and find assets using powerful filters and advanced metadata search features. Collaborate with Libraries and publish to Adobe Stock from Bridge.
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Xinet
Score 7.0 out of 10
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North Plains Systems in Toronto now offers and supports Xinet, a digital asset management platform with an emphasis on collaboration and sharing. The California company Xinet, the platform's original developer, was acquired by North Plains Systems in 2012.
If you're working with tons of files and different types of files and you have to keep them sorted out and be able to tell the differences within the files...this is the best option for you. It will make your life so much easier being able to preview everything quickly while seeing the small details. I do know that some photographers are really happy with how Lightroom catalogs their images, but I think for anyone doing major compositing or video work, Bridge is hands down the way to go. It just saves you so much time and headaches.
Tracking rights-managed assets. Xinet provides advanced features such as watermarking and expiration notifications.
Integration with Adobe. Xinet can be configured to access assets from right within the apps.
Desktop integration. Xinet can be accessed by the browser but also as a mountable server volume on the desktop. Unlike Box, Dropbox, etc., the mounted volume does not require consumption of hard drive space.
For my position, I didn't learn enough of Xinet to truly utilize the whole program, only one or two people in my department understood it inside and out.
During my time at the agency, we were unable to get the annotations to work on assets. And that would have been helpful to have to streamline our process of asset quality control.
Adobe Bridge is useful as a jumping off point for file organization within the CC environment. It is a little slow and clunky at times but is useful for preliminary photography selection development including contact sheets, file renaming, and the overall selection process.
Xinet is intuitive to use. It is perhaps the only DAM that features a traditional mounted volume, so anyone working in an environment with local servers will love it. Search is accurate and faceted searches allow users to narrow search results. Setup requires a lot of training if you want to leverage all of its complex workflow capabilities.
Support is handled by third-party server integrators. Our partner, NAPC, has always been there when we've needed them and also develops unique plugins to expand XInet's capabilities.
Okay so I've actually tried to use Lightroom. Photoshop is its own beast and doesn't have the catalog that Bridge of Lightroom has. Lightroom is not as powerful with being able to check between images, finding files, etc. I wanted to love it, but Bridge won hands down with all the time it has saved me so I can get back to my children instead of complaining that it takes me so much time to narrow down images
We selected Xinet based on having a large number of potential users and wanted unlimited web seats. Paying a one time software fee versus a monthly seat payment was a big draw. Telescope was four to five times more expensive and was not feasible at the time. We liked Basecamp but we needed a local solution for storage, not hosted.
Xinet is a great platform to build off of. We use it in combination with Enfocus Switch which has greatly improved the automation capabilities and we use Xinet as the portal for external users. Our internal users very rarely interact with the Xinet GUI.