Have you been actively using your DAM Solution and are starting to realize that your storage is getting too full? Or are you a company with too much content that’s trying to see if QBank can help you keep control and maybe clear out non-relevant assets? Then keep reading!
Our customers usually get in touch with our Customer Success team when their storage fills up. However, before doing so, we recommend you do this one simple maintenance step. That is to empty your trash regularly. This may seem quite obvious, but it’s easily overlooked. We have many clients who forget to do this step regularly, and the trash builds up with discarded assets quite easily.
Now, let’s say you’ve emptied your trash, but you still have thousands of assets taking up space on your QBank. Then it might be a good time to clean out your DAM Solution! Here are our top 3 tips on how to clean your QBank.
1. Work with filters
Our number one tip to users is that you work with the different filters available. When clients first begin the task of cleaning their QBank, the first step is usually to filter out images that are older than 10 - 5 years. Meaning they have a photo date that is older than 10-5 years.
This is something you can filter in your QBank, choosing filters which then has QBank retrieve all photos that were taken on that day X years ago. Making it easy for you to go through and get rid of any old photos you may not need to keep. Something to look out for is photos of people showing their faces because you might not still have the rights to publish them since their consent can have expired. The same goes with copyrights on creations, since these also expire with time.
You can also filter according to the type of photo you're looking for. Photos of employees, or events (or other things that you know may contain images of people), might be images where the people's consent has expired after all these years. We recommend you delete these old photos unless you know for a fact that the persons in the photos have given you consent to keep using them. Pay extra attention to photographs of people and environments that may have changed over time. Another good filter to check is "published" since this brings up old photos published on external sites. Allowing you to update those old photos to new ones that you know you have the rights to use.
2. Get rid of duplicates
If you see a small yellow warning triangle, that's QBank letting you know that the file is a duplicate. Duplicates are unnecessary to have laying around since they only take up space in your QBank. The easiest way to not end up with multiple asset duplicates in your QBank is to make sure that you do not approve them from the very beginning of uploading.
Simply put, do not accept duplicate assets. Instead, throw them in the trash when uploading. You can easily find any duplicates that may be hiding on your QBank by searching in your library and filtering for it to show "duplicates". QBank will then bring up all assets which are duplicates. Here it's important to look through all the assets to see if any are being used on external sites, are tagged, etc., and then delete the assets you do not want.
Are you unsure of which duplicates to keep or throw away? Contact our support team and they'll help you out with this.
3. Not ready to delete? Archive it!
Our third and final tip in this article is another easy one you might not have thought about - Archiving assets. If an asset isn't relevant anymore but you're not ready to permanently delete it, then there is a possibility to add an archive to your QBank. The archive essentially operates the same way as trash, but with a couple of main differences. Your archived assets can only be viewed. You're unable to use them in folders or Moodboards, you also can’t edit or download them in any way. Meaning there's no risk that they end up in the wrong hands. However, since they haven't been deleted, you're able to restore them if you wish.
Find out more about how to archiving files and what to do when an asset isn't relevant anymore.
A client perspective
Want to learn even more about how QBank can help if you have numerous assets and don’t know how to keep your DAM tidy? We recommend that you read our case study on our client Stadium for a more in-depth look into how gaining complete control of your assets and a tidy QBank can help maximize productivity.
