Canto Digital Asset Management (DAM)

What do you like best about the product?

There are many aspects of Canto that I appreciate in my work. I love how our whole team can collaborate. Even team members who don't have a seat can upload photos or view photos through share links. Also, the AI search feature has been a powerful tool for us this year.

What do you dislike about the product?

The filter search doesn't always work like I hope. Also when I click on an image to view it, a side panel with information comes up, but I have a couple of frustrations with it. 1, that view does not include all of the form fields I'd like to see. 2. Often, when I scroll down to view a lower field like facial recognition, it jumps to the full screen info panel, when I did not want it to do that. When I'm trying to do this with multiple images consecutively, it can be time consuming and frustrating.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Canto, we had our digital files stored in various locations and across different team members' devices. Having all of our assets in one place has been so helpful!

What do you like best about the product?

I love that Canto shows the metadata on the right side and allows for searching by metadata. This lets me search for approved or pending videos, type of video, content, or by country, which helps because we have videos and photos from different countries. It's usually pretty specific to what I'm looking for. I also like that you can write a little blurb about the photos and videos to read what the uploader writes.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sharing videos and collections in Canto is really difficult and unintuitive. It's hard to find where to share, and creating collections is a cumbersome process with too many steps. It doesn't just give you a straightforward URL link to share, instead you have to deal with emails and if the other person isn't on Canto, it becomes a huge hassle. On top of that, there's a buggy issue when adding metadata text where it's challenging to highlight all text at once without it getting cut off, and although I raised this six months ago, it still hasn't been fixed. Overall, nothing seems to change or improve, even though I've provided feedback multiple times over almost a year. It's frustrating and makes me feel like if it were my decision, we wouldn't use Canto due to the numerous issues and lack of progress.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Canto helps me find the correct videos and photos for editing from thousands of assets. It lets me filter using metadata like type, content, and location, streamlining my search process.

What do you like best about the product?

The platform is fairly simple and user-friendly. Creating folders and albums, once you are familiar with the system is straightforward. The registration process is simple and all of my global users have picked it up quickly.

What do you dislike about the product?

The AI search still needs work. No matter how I refine queries, I still get unrelated content in my results. A search for a specific place, a country, can still come back with images that are obviously not correct. The uploads link process has a major drawback in that it doesn't provide a menu of registered users to select. It's very time-consuming to input first name, last name and email address for every user I send a link to - which can be links to multiple albums in the same folder - but still require a separate uplink created for every album, rather than simply allowing the user to choose the album within that folder. Very time-consuming to create so many links in that fashion.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Having a web platform that all users in our org can access for all content - with a search option to help track down assets, is very helpful and a huge upgrade over past systems used.

What do you like best about the product?

I love that you can search someone's name or an event and easily find what you're looking for

What do you dislike about the product?

sometimes accessing different folders for our organization can be difficult

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our whole team has access to images, so projects don't get bottlenecked

What do you like best about the product?

I love the AI search feature, which makes it so much quicker to search for photos I need. I also like how we can set up event links to share in event programs, so people can find event photos that would otherwise not reach the student/audience. I also like how we can set upload permissions for our freelance photographers to upload their photos, streamlining the process of receiving and posting them.

What do you dislike about the product?

I found the onboarding and training process to be much longer and more repetitive than necessary. Canto Academy provided a strong foundation for learning the platform, but many of the follow-up meetings covered the same information we had already completed through the Academy.

The number and length of the meetings also felt excessive for a platform that is very user-friendly and intuitive. At times, the facilitation added to the repetition. We were frequently asked if we had questions, and even after indicating that we did not, the same information or question would sometimes be repeated. This made the sessions feel unnecessarily drawn out and, at times, the facilitator seemed impatient with the process.

I understand that some users may benefit from a more hands-on onboarding experience, but a one-size-fits-all approach may not be the most effective. For users who are comfortable with technology and able to learn independently through Canto Academy, I would recommend using the first meeting to assess how much additional support is actually needed. From there, follow-up meetings could be scheduled as needed to address specific questions or areas where additional guidance would be helpful.

A more flexible onboarding process based on the user's experience and comfort level would make the training more efficient while still providing additional support for those who need it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

File organization and distribution to internal and external clients.

What do you like best about the product?

I like having all of our assets in one place with Canto because it's been a huge time-saver for us. The ability to easily search and locate assets makes Canto our source of truth for templates and helps streamline our workflow.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve for some of the features has been time-consuming, although our onboarding rep Kevin and the tutorials helped a lot.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Canto allows us to easily search for assets and serves as our source of truth for templates, saving us time by having all assets in one place.

What do you like best about the product?

The portal interface is very user friendly! Duplicate detection and asset versioning are very useful for us!

What do you dislike about the product?

We wish there was a better way to separate teams within our organization that share the same library. RIght now, all the teams within our org share the same library, but we all have very different use-cases for the library, so there are additional considerations we need to make. It'd be ideal to have separated library spaces, where we could control the settings within our team's library without affecting the settings of another team.
Also, there are too many clicks when downloading from the main library. I wish we could change it to a one-click download.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's organizing all of our team's image assets, which helps us stay efficient in our video production

What do you like best about the product?

It's a centralized hub for sharing logos, promotional assets, and brand and style guides across our media organization.
Canto gives us backend flexibility to customize attributes while keeping frontend labels simple for our users. Features like bulk editing and approval statuses allow us to manage digital rights and review metrics efficiently without cluttering the user interface.
The combination of natural language visual search and automated metadata suggestions helps staff find what they need in seconds rather than wasting time hunting through drivers and folders.
Canto Portals allow us to share curated media kits and asset collections securely with external partners, contractors, and internal groups without giving them full access to our internal backend environment.
User-friendly training tools and responsive support make bringing new teams into Canto straightforward as we build one unified library.

What do you dislike about the product?

There isn't native batch-renaming tool for actual file names inside the interface. Additionally, while custom fields work well inside Canto, exporting assets back out can sometimes drop specialized structured metadata fields instead of writing them back to the IPTC file data.
Canto's reporting cannot track internal metadata like departments or project units. This makes it difficult to measure adoption rates by team, showcase cross-functional wins, or spot where specific groups need extra support - and this item was added to Canto's feature request list for future product updates.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are expanding Canto across our organization and working on integrations with project management tools like Airtable to establish and leverage a single source of truth for digital media.
Canto allows us to better mitigate copyright and legal liabilities.
Centralization of assets helps ensure internal teams and external partners use approved, accessible brand elements.
AI-assisted visual search and tagging, makes media instantly discoverable using natural language search - saving time and reducing frustration.

What do you like best about the product?

Being able to search images through keywords is so helpful

What do you dislike about the product?

I feel that the adobe integrations could be slightly more intuitive

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have sooooo many photos, so it helps solve the issue of spending hours searching for a specific photo

What do you like best about the product?

Their knowledge of asset management, and how to structure assets, is excellent.

What do you dislike about the product?

The feature set sometimes seems behind other DAMs out there.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Giving vendors access to our internal library was important. Canto allowed us to set up separate portals that only vendors could access. Those portals referenced assets in our main library and remained in sync.