Cloudinary is an image and video management tool enabling users to manage, optimize, and deliver images, videos and other media across every device and channel.
$49
per month
CONTENTdm
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
CONTENTdm is a DAM for libraries, from OCLC headquartered in Dublin, Ohio.
Cloudinary handles pretty much anything you have related to images. From serving them up efficiently to adding transformations on the fly, there's really little this service doesn't do. Their pricing plans allow you to grow into the right levels and their website dashboards are very helpful. I would easily recommend this for all but the simplest of use cases.
CONTENTdm is well-suited for smaller organizations as a simple solution to present a digital collection on the web. If your need is complex and requires digital preservation as part of the workflow, it may not be the best solution.
As a digital asset management system, one would expect the capability of managing preservation, which CONTENTdm lacks.
Lack of batch updating and other advanced metadata management capabilities.
The usage statistics does not work, and the company is not planning to fix it, at least based the interaction with tech support staff. Customers were referred to use Google Analytics.
Cloudinary is very easy to use and offers fast way to upload your images, files and videos to their servers. Then they give you quick ways t implement those files or images onto your website using their API or just a normal URL. They also give you very fast ways to make edits to those files and include them in the url.
We rarely use their support. But when we need it they are always there. They provide great consultation and suggestions to help us manage our costs and resources better. In the last 8 years perhaps we have contacted them 3 or 4 times - which is really really great
Cloudinary seemed to be the most sophisticated with the most documentation and platform support. Other solutions seemed to be a lot harder to implement, however, due to the good documentation and API samples on their GitHub we were able to implement it nicely. Additionally, they have a lot of really well-known brands using them like Wired, Sky News, and eBay which gave us a lot of confidence that this was a good robust solution to use and to help others with
We selected CONTENTdm because it had a good reputation, was used by many institutions, provided a good product, and supplied feedback and monthly reports. We are wondering about DPLA and if that will be the next evolution or platform.
Images are essential to our product and using Cloudinary has allowed us to serve them up in a cost-effective and efficient way. Not having to worry about your images frees you up to tackle the real challenges for your product.
It helped us to get started with our digital collections projects at a relatively low cost.
As our needs grew, it became apparent that we needed something more powerful, and that provides better workflows and better statistics and is able to handle the whole life cycle of digitation projects.
