Merlin allows us to easily share photo assets with our network of Habitat affiliates in the U.S., and with our national organization offices in more than 70 countries. My favorite tool is the ability to share email previews of contact sheets containing links to directly download images. That gives us the ability to share collections of photos directly with our clients, without having to upload files to Dropbox. That’s a huge time saver for our team. I also can’t say enough about their amazing customer service. They quickly respond to our questions, and the available training helps us get the most out of the service.

The more I learn about Merlin, the less I see that I would consider a negative. You can credit the customer service team for helping us through anything we don't understand.

A very positive experience they have a great staff that helps problem solve they are innovative, and they are continually improving the quality of their products and the services they provide to their clients. 

When searching for A DAM system, Shriners Childrens needed a system that was HIPAA-compliant and MerlinOne offered this service along with great customer service and efficient communication. The MerlinOne DAM system organizes our companies’ assets in a way that maximizes their value for our brand it allows us to set varying levels of user access for files and folders, and we can easily share files internally and externally with our vendors. A great tool to have on the cloud it has been very valuable during the pandemic as employees started to work remotely, this system allowed us to continue to do our work while having instant access to our assets from any location at any time our teams continued to be efficient while adapting to the virtual working conditions.

The content hubs are a great tool, but it’s still a work in progress and additional features are needed.

Once you figure it out, the system is very easy to use and retrieve content. Search features are great.

Does not generate permalinks to content/collections; they expire after 24 hours and thus cannot embed content collections on website.

Customer Support is prompt. It has been overall good.

Efforts have been made to compete with the other products out there. Thats apparent. Please continue in this direction. The BIGGEST feedback I got from our users who got a look at Libris.... was how easy it seemed compared to the Merlin interfaces.

Somewhat slow - I know this has been looked into, and also dependent on our internet speed, but we have a very fast connection ... the lags that happen just don't look good to those, who are already not huge fans of Merlin, you may be showing photography assets to etc.

I like the many options available to the user when it comes to customizing the system. I work in the education space and some of the items that we like to tag when saving our digital assets can be very intimately related to our field i.e. students on campus, students in different buildings throughout the school, students wearing branded school gear or just the spaces around the campus to show the school. It's nice that we could build a taxonomy that is specific to us, this makes searching our files easier.

I least like the fact that it can be a bit cumbersome to navigate; sometimes I am uploading hundreds of photos and find that some of the files didn't upload properly - however I have received very good customer service support on this issue which I appreciate.

Able to customize metadata fields, including their values and the way the field functions.

It is continuously improving, and I believe the staff and their interest in my feedback and recommendations. They really do try to create a product that fits their users' needs. I like that a lot of the features and tools are customizable, and can be enabled or disabled granularly based on user or user group.

It takes a long time to download videos from the software. Managing the multiple user groups can be overwhelming since there are so many that come with the software as a default.

Simply put, I can't imagine doing my job without Merlin.

It is easy to train people on Merlin's basic functions, and that's all most of our users need. It's also fairly easy to train power users on most of Merlin's more powerful features.

I still find it difficult to deal with video. I simply can't remember how to output sub-clips. That used to not be too much of a problem, but video is a growing part of my job.

We were one of the first nonprofits that MerlinOne took on, allowing us to get a huge amount of digital content off our file server and into a robust DAMS system that could help us track and share assets across three continents.

If you can do a Google search, you can search Merlin with little additional training. The interface is very user-friendly, and we have trained multiple staffers with varying levels of computer skills.

Metadata fields are very structured and somewhat limiting. Would like to tailor them more to our needs without incurring back-end programming expenses.

MerlinOne is our archive of published stories, and photographs as well as PDFs of our pages - which are fully searchable.

Simple setup for files and metadata, and our librarian can dump content to Merlin in a single system. It's easy to set up and easy to make configuration changes, and the FTP hot folder is trouble free.

No Windows mobile native apps. It would be nice if this was added to the company roadmap. I can't think of a better asset management system and would urge anyone considering purchasing one to absolutely give MerlineOne a try.

Centralize all digital assets help increase both efficiency and effectiveness.

We got MerlinONE up and running in a matter of days. No lengthy implementation and a major productivity increase.

Hard to say, any issues we had were quickly ironed out. One very minor thing I would love to see would be more printer template options for printing archived articles. That is a very small thing though, overall MerlinONE was our go-to software when we were up against a tight deadline.

I've been impressed by the amount of customizations you can make in Merlin. Their customer service department has been very helpful when it comes to constricting creative solutions to project management problems and usually responds promptly.

Be prepared to work extensively with their customer support. In my previous DAMs I had much more direct control over field rules, creating new fields, complex user group customization, etc. Merlin customer support has to do all of that for you. While they do usually respond promptly and are helpful, I would much rather do it all myself to avoid errors in communication and delays.

A simple way for customers to look at and review their tearsheets. We have saved money by no longer printing extra copies of ads and mailing them to the customer. The tearsheets are available more quickly than they would have been with mail.

This is a very easy system to use. The documentation is complete and helpful. The support is wonderful and always provides quick, accurate responses.

Some of the date features are frustrating. Primarily how the calendar is displayed as Monday through Sunday, which takes some time getting used to.

I enjoy the diversity of file supported file types and that they are all viewable in the software. It's great for being able to share large quantities high quality photos. The multiple ways you can upload files to the system is great as well. Being able to search by any of the Metadata fields is incredibly useful (date taken, location, creator, subject info). The customer support service is fantastic, they can help with everything you could possibly need. They genuinely want their customers to get the fullest use out of this system.

I wish it had more of a file structure like a hard drive with individual folders instead of being one large mass of photos. If photos are uploaded with incorrect metadata they are very challenging to find. It's not the easiest software to use at first and takes a while to learn. If you aren't accustomed to using metadata in your photos, the initial workload will be huge as this system functions best when using metadata. Thankfully Merlin has amazing customer support that are truly concerned with making sure you learn how to use the system to its fullest potential.

Ability to catalog our photos. Ability to upload and download photos. Ability to tag photos.

Most liked: 1) Ability to meet our needs for managing our photos in an efficient manner 2) Ability to search for relevant content 3) Support we received from vendor

Least liked: 1) Could have had more training and refresher training for our staff. Initial training was good but we needed more examples of how to use in our environment 3)

The software makes it so easy to go in and search for the assets we're looking for. We're able to bucket our photos into different areas based on the needs of the company, which makes finding what we're after even more effective.

We often have big sets of content to load in batches. Would like to be able to batch load more from the site itself vs. using an FTP for those.

MerlinOne has provided us with a powerful, easy to use digital asset management system in a hosted solution. I deal with a lot of vendors, and MerlinOne's technical support is second to none. They carefully listen to their customers needs and try to improve their product accordingly.

Excellent technical support. Very responsive to customer needs with development. Hosted solution allows us to focus our resources elsewhere.

It's very easy to use and its search engine is terrific.

The new interface is a little hard to navigate and sometimes there are glitches in the functions.