Selecting the appropriate digital asset management (DAM) software is a critical decision for your business, as not all DAMs offer the features and functionalities that align with your team’s unique requirements.
In this blog, we’ll provide a comparison between two highly acclaimed DAM platforms, Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset. This comparison aims to guide you in making an informed choice that best suits your business needs.
What Is OpenAsset?
OpenAsset is a specialized digital asset management (DAM) system tailored for the architecture, engineering, construction, and real estate sectors.
It stands out for its project-based organizational structure, which allows users to link digital assets like images, videos, and documents directly to specific projects. This makes retrieving and managing relevant files more efficient.
Additionally, OpenAsset offers robust search functionality, leveraging metadata and tags to facilitate quick and precise file location. Its focus on industry-specific needs makes it a valuable tool for professionals managing large volumes of visual and design-related assets.
What Is Adobe Bridge?
Adobe Bridge is a digital asset management app by Adobe Systems, designed to help organize, preview, and manage large collections of media files. It’s especially useful for creative professionals like photographers and graphic designers. In fact, Bridge was originally created as an add-on to Photoshop for photographers to organize and process their photos, but it has since been developed into a product for more than just photographers.
Bridge offers features such as sorting, tagging, and editing metadata, along with seamless integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications for easy access and editing.
Additionally, it supports batch processing for efficient handling of repetitive tasks and includes Adobe Camera Raw for processing raw images, making it a versatile tool for managing a wide range of digital assets.
How Is Adobe Bridge Different From Adobe Experience Manager?
You may have heard of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a DAM, but is it the same as Adobe Bridge? If not, how does it differ from Adobe Bridge? And which one is right for you if any?
Adobe Bridge and AEM are both part of Adobe’s extensive suite of creative and content management tools, but they serve different purposes and target different user groups within the digital asset management spectrum. Here’s how they differ:
Adobe Bridge
Functionality and Purpose
Adobe Bridge is primarily a desktop application that provides local digital asset management. It’s designed to help individual users or small teams organize, browse, and preview their media files, including images, videos, and documents. It’s particularly useful for photographers, designers, and other creative professionals who need to manage large collections of digital assets on a local system.
User Interface and Experience
Bridge offers an intuitive interface that allows users to efficiently organize files by renaming, rating, and tagging them. It also supports batch editing and conversion of file formats.
Integrations
Bridge integrates seamlessly with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications, providing a centralized place to manage assets across projects. For example, users can easily access and place files into Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign directly from Bridge. However to edit with Photoshop, for example, you’ll need to have a paid subscription for that tool.
While it can serve as a standalone application, Bridge works best as a complement to Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, offering a seamless workflow for accessing and managing assets across Adobe’s creative software. We’ll look at the specific tools Adobe Bridge integrates with later in the blog.
Cost and Accessibility
Bridge is available as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, making it accessible to anyone with an Adobe subscription at no additional cost.
Adobe Experience Manager
Functionality and Purpose
AEM is a comprehensive content management solution (CMS) designed for large organizations to manage their websites, mobile apps, forms, and related digital experiences. It offers a wide range of functionalities including web content management, digital asset management (DAM), digital enrollment forms, and marketing campaign management.
AEM Assets, as a component of the Experience Manager platform, serves as a DAM solution designed to help enterprises manage and distribute their digital assets effectively. AEM’s DAM solution provides a centralized platform for managing assets across an entire organization, with their connected metadata in one secure location.
User Interface and Experience
AEM provides a more complex set of tools tailored to the needs of marketers, IT professionals, and web developers. It goes beyond basic asset management by including features such as dynamic media, which allows for the automatic resizing and optimization of images and videos for different channels.
You’ll discover numerous available tools including visual search, enterprise-level metadata, management of assets across multiple languages, and smart tagging. These features are all tailored for the efficient organization, management, and retrieval of assets.
Overall, it supports creating, managing, and optimizing customer-facing digital experiences with a focus on delivering personalized content.
Integrations
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) allows for smooth integration with the following Adobe Experience Cloud products:
- Adobe Analytics provides marketers with actionable, real-time intelligence about online strategies and marketing initiatives.
- Adobe Target gives marketers the ability to continually make their online content more relevant to their customers — yielding greater conversion.
- Adobe Dynamic Media Classic automates media management, streamlines web publishing, and enhances web experiences, all in a hosted environment.
- Adobe Dynamic Tag Management gives marketers intuitive tools to quickly and easily manage an unlimited number of Adobe and third-party tags.
- Adobe Campaign lets you manage email delivery content directly in Adobe Experience Manager.
Additionally, you can integrate AEM with Creative Cloud and with third-party services.
Cost and Accessibility
AEM is an enterprise-level solution, which means it’s significantly more expensive than Bridge. However, you’ll need to contact a company representative to know the price of your specific choice. It’s designed for corporations and large organizations that require a scalable, comprehensive content management system.
Choosing between Adobe Bridge and AEM depends on your business needs. However, for this blog, we’ll be focusing on how Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset compare.
Adobe Bridge vs. OpenAsset: Top Industries
Selecting the appropriate Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is largely influenced by the unique requirements, workflows, and compliance standards specific to your industry. Each industry has its own set of demands that dictate the features and functionality needed in an ideal DAM solution.
Here’s how Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset compare when it comes to the top industries they serve:
Adobe Bridge
Bridge is suited for creative professionals and designers who handle various creative assets, including photos, vectors, videos, and 3D files. Bridge, along with Adobe Camera RAW, provides an alternative to Lightroom, offering photographers the ability to directly browse and edit images on their file system.
OpenAsset
On the other hand, OpenAsset is built with architecture, engineering, construction, and real estate professionals in mind. The functionalities of this system are customized to address the unique requirements of AEC firms, including organizing assets based on projects, compatibility with AEC-dedicated software, and capabilities to efficiently manage and present project portfolios and resumes.
Adobe Bridge vs. OpenAsset: Capabilities
Your organization’s creative workflow is heavily reliant on your Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. An effective DAM should organize your assets, enhance productivity, foster collaboration, and allow your team to focus on tasks that increase revenue.
Let’s compare OpenAsset and Adobe Bridge to evaluate how they stand against each other in terms of essential DAM capabilities.
Organization
To ensure long-term organization and easy retrieval of assets, you need a robust DAM tailored to your industry. Let’s take a look at where Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset structure this capability:
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge offers a more general approach to organization, suitable for a wide range of creative assets.
It facilitates the organization of assets utilized in creating content for print, web, and video. Adobe Bridge allows you to classify elements into libraries that align with your workflows and creative endeavors. You can manage your assets effectively using labels, ratings, metadata, and keywords.
The software also ensures that both Adobe native files (like PSD and PDF) and non-Adobe files are readily accessible. It allows you to effortlessly drag assets into your layouts, projects, and compositions whenever required. Additionally, you can preview files and enrich them with metadata (file information), enhancing their searchability and ease of location.
OpenAsset
OpenAsset enables the organization of digital assets in a project-centric manner. This feature is especially beneficial for AEC firms, where an abundance of visual content and documents are produced for each project. By assigning assets to designated projects, users can efficiently find the materials they need.
For sustained organization and straightforward retrieval, OpenAsset uses a consistent keyword taxonomy coupled with a project-focused structure. This approach guarantees that assets remain easily searchable throughout their entire lifecycle.
Search
Keywords, often consisting of single words or phrases, are the terms utilized by individuals to conduct searches in a database to find information pertinent to a specific subject. Within the framework of a DAM system, these relevant keywords enable users to navigate the database with ease and effectively locate the exact assets they require.
Here’s how Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset tackle searching in their software:
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge provides comprehensive search capabilities across a broad range of file types. Its metadata and keyword search functions are effective for general creative assets.
Bridge enables you to employ sophisticated filters, collections, and search functions to locate the specific assets you need. It can filter images based on specific criteria, allowing you to view, for instance, only those photos with a five-star rating, or those taken with a specific lens or at a certain focal length.
Bridge also allows you to combine photos into collections, facilitating the grouping of related images. These collections can include images from various folders or even different hard drives, offering a convenient way to organize dispersed assets.
Moreover, in Adobe Bridge, you can search for files and folders using a variety of search criteria combinations. This search criteria can be saved as a smart collection, a type of collection that automatically updates to include files that match your specified criteria.
These smart collections function like live search results, instructing Bridge to automatically incorporate any images into the collection as soon as they fulfill the set criteria.
OpenAsset
OpenAsset’s distinctive search feature uses AI to do more than just locate the correct files; it also helps users in uncovering additional relevant assets that might have been missed. The advanced integration of AI improves the search process, leading to a more effective discovery of assets.
Moreover, the platform’s sophisticated search tools and extensive tagging system enable users to quickly find particular images or delve into discovering new ones in the system.
The robust tagging system eases the task of finding the appropriate asset among a multitude, making the search process not only efficient but also user-friendly, particularly when managing large quantities of assets.
Collaboration
When effectively utilized, your DAM can expedite your workflows from beginning to end, ensuring that reviews and approvals are transparent and easily understandable for all involved parties. Here’s how Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset support collaboration:
Adobe Bridge
While Bridge offers basic collaboration tools, it’s primarily designed for individual use. Collaboration is possible, but not as seamlessly integrated as in some other DAM systems.
With Adobe Bridge, you can share assets and elements from your libraries with other users, enabling them to interact with items in your shared libraries or extend access to additional users. You have the option to share your libraries with others, granting them permission to view, edit, utilize, rename, move, or delete content within the shared library.
OpenAsset
OpenAsset’s version control feature is crucial for collaborative projects that often go through several document changes. It guarantees that team members are using the most recent versions of documents and visual assets, which is vital in fields where precision and accuracy are key.
Additionally, OpenAsset allows users to share collections of assets with both internal and external collaborators. These collections can be distributed through shareable links, with options for password protection or setting an expiration date for added security.
Moreover, OpenAsset’s document creation tools facilitate team collaboration in the document development process. Multiple members can contribute to a document concurrently, streamlining the input and review stages. This functionality is particularly beneficial for project managers and teams engaged in difficult AEC projects.
Integrations
The integrations your company needs will be closely related to the industry in which you operate. Here’s how Adobe Bridge and OpenAsset compare:
Adobe Bridge
Naturally, Bridge offers integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications, making it a go-to choice for users heavily reliant on Adobe’s ecosystem.
Bridge integrates with Adobe services such as Adobe Stock. For example, you can directly add a watermarked stock image from the Adobe Stock website to any of your libraries. This watermarked image can then be utilized in your documents as an asset linked to your library.
Adobe Bridge Integrations include:
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Camera Raw
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- Adobe Stock
OpenAsset
OpenAsset, tailored specifically for the AEC industry, provides specialized integrations with tools and software commonly utilized in these sectors. This includes integrations with popular CRM and ERP systems frequently used by AEC firms, as well as Adobe products. These integrations enable a smoother workflow in handling digital assets and different areas of project management.
Moreover, OpenAsset’s document creation tools, like InDesign, integrate directly with the DAM system. This allows users to effortlessly access images from their asset library. This streamlined approach removes the necessity to separately search for and download assets, thereby saving time and promoting consistency.
OpenAsset integrations include:
- Procore
- AEC 360
- Deltek Vision
- Deltek Vantagepoint
- Affinity
- Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel
- Okta
- Salesforce
- Unanet/ Cosential CRM
- Templafy
- InDesign
Metadata
The best DAM systems have high-quality metadata and tagging features, empowering users to organize files that align with their business needs. Here’s how Adobe Bridge compares to OpenAsset:
Adobe Bridge
Adobe Bridge provides robust metadata editing and viewing capabilities, suitable for a wide range of media types, and is especially powerful when used in conjunction with other Adobe products. It allows you to view and organize metadata from various files.
However, its search functionality is limited to Adobe’s ‘standard’ metadata. If this standard metadata meets your needs, you can utilize the “Keywords and Metadata” tabs to adjust columns like Name, Date Created, Size, Type, Rating Ranking, and Keywords.
Unfortunately, many organizations do not extensively use this standard metadata, nor do they prefer to search using it. Instead, these organizations often require the capability to search by custom metadata values, like brand names, product names, product numbers, and similar criteria.
OpenAsset
We’ve briefly mentioned how OpenAsset uses metadata and tagging for organization and during searching. The ability to quickly find files in a DAM system containing thousands of digital assets is largely dependent on effective metadata tagging.
Utilizing extensive metadata and tagging options enables users to effortlessly locate files within their DAM, enhancing productivity and reducing the effort needed to retrieve files.
OpenAsset features a powerful tagging system that allows users to label images and documents with project-specific information, including project name, location, or bespoke metadata. This capability is where OpenAsset excels, facilitating easy and efficient access and retrieval of files.
With OpenAsset’s metadata and tagging organization features, you save valuable time and resources looking through drives for files with inconsistent naming conventions.
Adobe Bridge: Best DAM for Creative Professionals and Designers
Adobe Bridge stands out as the preferred DAM system for creative professionals, like designers, compared to OpenAsset, largely due to its broad compatibility with various types of creative assets and its seamless integration with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. However, because users frequently find that they need to turn to additional Adobe applications for in-depth photo editing, this can interrupt the flow of their workflow.
Moreover, Adobe Bridge is useful for solo users because it lacks the collaboration capabilities required for larger teams. Adobe Bridge is ideal for creative professionals, such as graphic designers, photographers, and video editors because Bridge is made to support and meet the DAM needs of a large or growing firm and these professionals often work independently.
Additionally, Adobe Bridge provides a user-friendly interface that resonates well with the workflows of designers and artists. Its layout and functionalities are intuitively aligned with the needs of creative professionals, making the organization, previewing, and accessing a wide range of assets more efficient and effective.
OpenAsset: Best DAM for AEC Firms
OpenAsset is the best Digital Asset Management (DAM) system for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) firms primarily due to its industry-specific features. Tailored for the AEC sector, OpenAsset is the leader in handling the large volumes of project photographs, construction plans, and design projects that are typical in these industries.
Unlike Adobe Bridge, which offers a more general approach to asset management, OpenAsset excels in a project-based organizational structure. This is highly beneficial for AEC firms where projects are central, requiring assets to be meticulously linked to specific projects.
Additionally, OpenAsset’s integration with common AEC tools, such as CRM and ERP systems, streamlines workflows in a way that the Adobe-product-centric Adobe Bridge cannot.
The custom metadata and tagging capabilities in OpenAsset are particularly aligned with the needs of the AEC industry. This feature enables more efficient categorization and retrieval of project-specific documents and images, a critical aspect for these firms.
Moreover, OpenAsset is designed to enhance collaboration and sharing, essential components in the collaborative and often complex project environment of AEC firms. It supports effective sharing and version control of documents among team members, facilitating smoother project execution.
In contrast, Adobe Bridge, while powerful, is more generic in its project design and functionality, making OpenAsset the more tailored and, therefore, preferable choice for AEC industry needs.
Choosing the Right DAM: OpenAsset vs. Adobe Bridge
When choosing a DAM, it all comes down to the industry and your team’s needs.
For example, OpenAsset is more specialized, targeting the AEC industry with its project-based approach, while Adobe Bridge is a more versatile tool, better suited for a variety of creative professionals who work across different types of media.
The choice between them largely depends on the specific needs of your industry and workflow.
When considering different DAM solutions, it’s beneficial to refer to our extensive DAM software buyer’s guide. This guide is tailored to help you make an informed decision by pinpointing the key features your organization requires in a digital asset management system.
Moreover, for a more comprehensive understanding, we provide in-depth comparisons of various platforms such as Bynder, Brandfolder, Canto, and Frontify, enabling you to thoroughly evaluate all your options.
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