Though nearly all manufacturers provide product images to their retailers at no cost, the repetitive nature of the distribution, collection and management of hundreds of millions of files per year carries a price tag close to $5B.
The Shotfarm Platform reduces this inefficiency by 85% simply by centralizing these processes for thousands of retailers and manufacturers. If that’s not enough to convince you that it’s time to change, consider this: it’s 100% free.
All of the features below are built in to The Shotfarm Platform and come at no cost to all of our members. For companies looking to further increase their productivity, shotfarm offers some incredible plugins at no-brainer pricing. Click on The Shotfarm Plugins on the right to learn more.
Whether uploading ten or 10,000 images, members can use one of shotfarm’s three powerful uploaders to quickly get their product images and information into the system. Our most popular is called the “Manifest Uploader” which takes a spreadsheet and a .zip file and marries images and data together automatically.
Instead of folders, shotfarm uses product metadata and a powerful LightBox system to make organizing and finding assets across multiple sources an absolute breeze. For example, a thousand manufacturers using shotfarm can organize their assets differently without affecting a retailer’s ability to find them.
Once you’ve gathered the assets you need, you can either download them all in a single .zip file, serve them directly to your website using our optional Rich Media Hosting service, share them with anyone, push them to any FTP site or directly to third-party providers such as Adobe Scene7 and ecommerce platforms.
Shotfarm is determined to solve the problem of data exchange. We feel that the only way to do this is by centralizing the process – and that the only way to centralize the process is by making it free for all partners. Our members have unlimited use of all the tools in The Shotfarm Platform which will remain forever free.
Shotfarm is THE most efficient way to communicate information. Unlike any other Digital Asset Management system, shotfarm starts by centralizing manufacturers’ product images and information within the entire retail industry. Self-service access can then be given to any shotfarm member – from internal departments to external partners.
At its core, shotfarm is a rock-solid Digital Asset Management system with many of the features found in high-priced solutions. But our networked model goes far beyond the capabilities of any DAM by offering such advantages as standardized data and workflow across ALL partners and ALL channels.
With your partners on the same network, security becomes very easy to manage. Through a single easy-to-use permissions panel, manufacturers can 1) keep their assets completely private, 2) “Publish” their assets to make them visible to the retail community or 3) “Grant Permissions” to specific retail companies for full download access.
We’ve taken the best from DropBox, YouSendIt, Box.net and other file sharing services and built them right into shotfarm. Sharing a specific group of assets with any member or non-member is as easy as adding assets to a LightBox, clicking “Share”, and then entering email address(es) from the built-in address book. A link to the images is immediately sent.
Filenames are all over the place and can be a nightmare to decode. Since shotfarm uses basic product information to identify images, our users can find, manage and share files without ever having to look at a file name. And, with our new SuperNamer Plugin, any conceivable naming convention can performed on download for perfectly consistent file names regardless of the number of sources!
© February 2012 Shotfarm, LLC. All rights reserved.