Item: Canto
Rating: 9
Author: Mark Breneman

Overall Satisfaction with Canto

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Canto has helped us find and distribute photos across our organization. Before Canto, a very select few staff had access to the network drive that had thousands of folders full of photos. Finding a photo for a project was a multi-hour project that required lots of specific knowledge. Canto reduced that time to 15-20 mins. We have also leveraged the templating features to distribute customizable social media graphics to our field staff across the US to enable them to do localized campaigns.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Templating / Customizable Graphics
Portals - Building sets of photos around specific needs
Search - Quickly find the photos

Cons

There needs to be a way to add instructions for the end-user: "how to use these photos/files."
Once the portals grow over a certain size, they become harder to navigate without resorting to searching.
There needs to be a way to add instructions to the templating system for the end-user. There are a few steps that you "just have to know" what step to take next.

Return on Investment

Canto templating system has freed up our design team from producing hundreds of banners and other graphics each year.
Canto has allowed us to outsource large banner printing and shipping to local printshops.
Canto or any photo indexing system requires a significant amount of time to tag and categorize images.

Support Rating

The presales support, implementation support, and post-implementation support have been great. Due to tech and minor cross-department coordination issues on our end, our implementation did not go as planned. Canto was gracious and rolled with the changes. Presales support was very good at answering lots of tech questions and educating us about what we needed to know.

Usability

If we had slightly different use cases, Canto would receive a 10 out of 10. In our case, as the public portals grow, they start to become a bit harder to navigate. Other than desiring more custom control of how Canto imports images, the usability is very good.

Key Insights

Do you think Canto delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Canto's feature set?

Yes

Did Canto live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Canto go as expected?

Would you buy Canto again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe PhotoShop, Atom, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)

Likelihood to Recommend

Canto is great for photo storage and organization. Though, mass importing of photos is a bit of a weakness. Our photo team likes using software that adds a lot of meta tags into the photos. It would be great to have more control over the import process and meta tag/data mapping.

Comments

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Canto brings search capability to a mess of photo folders.