What are Canto users saying about the software?

Fantastic product for image library sorting and tagging

Great product that is easy to use.

Our representative always responds to us in a timely manner. She is very helpful with any questions or Canto solutions that our university might be interested in.

Pros

I really like how easy it is to upload, organize and tag photos. The facial recognition feature is great when dealing with lots of photos of people, like we do as a university. It is amazingly accurate and will recognize people from photos when they were 20 years younger. It's very easy to search for photos.

Cons

I can't complain. We probably don't take advantage of a lot of features Canto has to offer.

Stay Organized In Style - Great for Multiple Users

Overall the experience has been good - customer service is prompt and helpful and they respond quickly to issues. Overall it serve the purpose of organizing, tagging, filtering, searching, downloading and sharing. The feedback has been positive from other users, so long as they can find what they are looking for (and this is due to whomever is in charge, tagging, and doing the organizing). This is not a product that will take care of itself, you need an administrator that is working in the product on a regular basis to make it work.

Pros

We decided to use Canto because of many features including the design, customizability, customer service, large thumbnails, organizational structure, tagging feature, and portal for outside consumers.

Cons

You really need an organized person to keep this DAM working for everyone in your company/business so that the organizational structure makes sense. The less cooks in the kitchen, the better - one person should really spearhead the overall design, tags and org. Overall it works for High-Ed. Must pay attention to the little things (like expiring links to photos or albums) - can get tedious and redundant where you need to fix links if you don't pay attention to these things in the beginning.

Practical tool but barely innovative.

Canto enables me to grant file access to many of our departments world wide.

Pros

Canto seems to be simple enough for even unexperienced users. It is clearly structured and all functions are easy to spot and use.

Cons

For a software that was recently developed it seems rather simple in style and function: we only received what we specifically asked for and there is nothing wrong with it but a bit of innovation goes a long way. Why not connect it with actual folders on our operating system Microsoft Windows like Dropbox: At some point, we will need to store all files somewhere anyway to upload them to Canto, why not allow a direct uplad from a designated folder windows without having to open the browser? Make that folder accessable via FTP connection, too to have backup access when Canto is down or when there is a browser problem. Image previews and navigating through Canto should easier: navigating through it takes time, sometimes you might select a wrong image due to bad visibility of small thumbnails and even going back one step wastes precious time due to loading time and selecting a new image. I would suggest a slide show feature like the standard picture viewer in Microsoft Windows. Same goes for Video previews. I like working with Canto but it always feels like we are working with a beta version, waiting for the shiny real thing to arrive.

One stop shop for digital asset management and sharing

Canto has helped us to share assets across the team in an organised fashion. I love the ability to tag and sort the images as we see fit and use the custom tagging features to ensure the team can search by whatever is easiest for them. You can easily find all assets for a particular product by searching for that product name, or all content featuring the same model. It's also been helpful in the post-production process for shoots, whereby we can have conversations with the photographer via Canto comments. This has saved a lot of back and forth! The team love it and it's made our lives a lot easier since we've been using it.

Pros

Custom tagging Comments Easy to share assets

Cons

Adding more power users is an additional cost that I would like to see reduced Adding more custom keywords could be a little more user-friendly but it's still easy to use as is.

Efficient tool allows our creatives to thrive

Awesome tool that has kept out large team aligned and on the same page.

Pros

• One source of truth for a wide range of assets • Prevents access and server issues with a team spread throughout the country • Easy to use and deploy, while constantly refining structure and strategy • Branded portals allow our employees to self-serve versus manually managing daily requests

Cons

• Interface can be clunky; needs a modern refreshed makeover! • More style guides to customize for different needs and brands within one organization

Canto Met all of Our Expectations and More

I think the amount of uses that we have found beyond our standard need case of storing and easily searching our large photos has been numerous. Easily sharing documents and links have been invaluable. Our training department is now using it to provide ongoing training to our teams, we have several portals for different use cases.

Pros

Canto has been easy to use and easy to get up and running. The simplicity of having all of our images in one place have been astronomical. The amount of time spent wasted looking for marketing images has been eliminated completely. That was our main purpose for selecting a DAM platform.

Cons

The only bad thing I can say was our onboarding tech wasn't really the greatest. Her training was not great. She was good at keeping her meetings and the scheduling, but when she was on, she had a hard time keeping track of where she was at with training. There was some wasted time. there.

Top Tier DAM

Pros

Canto is extremely user friendly, straight forward, and a great value. All support is provided in-house and they go above and beyond to resolve issues.

Cons

There is not a feature that Canto doesn't offer. CDN performance with faster loading would be my only suggestion.

Versatile and easy to use DAM with great features and product support

The business problem that we were trying to solve with Canto was the presence of disparate data and media availability, depending on the author. Media was being shared inconsistently across the organization and needed to be accessed in various ways instead of having one standardized way of working with our digital assets. Canto has essentially solved those problems completely internally, with the added benefit of being available to be used to share assets outside of our internal team.

Pros

The features available within Canto are well designed and well implemented. We needed a solution for managing various types of digital assets for different use cases, and Canto fit the bill exactly. In addition to the great product, Canto's implementation and support teams were fantastic and helped our implementation to go extremely smoothly.

Cons

There is very little to dislike about Canto. All of the features promised to us during the sales cycle were available, and we found no "gotchas" or surprises. We could have used some more guidance about how/when to use the Portals feature, but that ended up being a minor issue in our case.

Great Value DAM

Pros

The ability to create custom fields, manage our database, and our workflows.

Cons

There were some difficulties getting our previous library and the data associated with each asset moved over. However once we got that done it has been a much better library experience than our old DAM.

Wow! awesome tool and affordable!

Pros

Wow, I have been using this for the free trial and so far I am sold. It makes my marketing content and photography so easy to work with others remotely so impressed with this for sure.Canto makes it easy to manage my large digital content.

Cons

So far I am still trying it out to organize and trying all of my marketing content. So far I love that I can do that music, videos, photos all from one platform and yes I will be signing beyond the free trial.

Easy & Straight Forward to Use - Evaluation of Integration Process Required

The sales process was a pleasure to go through and I would rate Canto number 1 in creating an enjoyable, no pressure experience. We have other vendors that I would be happy to continue my working career never speaking again to due to their practices and lack of overall respect.

Pros

The product itself is straight forward, easy to use and fairly customizable. The tagging system works great, file storage is good (once you identify what you would like), upload links are beneficial and the portals are key for deliverable.

Cons

The configuration of SSO does not allow enough control for the administrators of this tool, it also caused quirks for administrative accounts, where one experience via login vs via SSO was different for the admins; and the system didn't recognize licenses as being used when configured via SSO. Overall, we had to disable it for the time being which is a big loss/hit to our change management process. The Style Guide tool is a great idea, but needs some work and should not be used as a deciding factor in the tool. It needs some more work and analysis on managing font, including details on using logos, etc. to be a proper style guide. It works well for corporate colours, and that's about it. Lastly, the integration process needs some evaluation on the Canto side. It is lengthy, the "integration specialists" cannot answer questions that we can figure out ourselves with ease, and it doesn't seem like there is much support or guidance. In all honesty, we could do it ourselves must faster.

Canto is no-brainer for file storage/sorting/sharing

We are able to share whole folders if images with our team members as well as with outside clients from one platform. We assign work to each other from here as well. Sharing with outside clients is one of my favorite points. I can share a link to the content with them without having to reupload images to Google Drive or Dropbox or Onedrive. I

Pros

I really enjoy having the shareable links that can direct outside parties to folders that have their content in them. This way I don't have to use another third-party tool like Google Drive or Dropbox to share documents with clients. Downloading content is easy as well. The My Collections function is great in that it allows me select save files to the My Collections folder. This can help make it easier to find images and documents that I use most often. I also like being able to filter by keywords and tags. It is important that your team utilize these correctly and have unified definitions in place before using this, though. However, this can make it much easier to find what you're looking for.

Cons

The search function does leave something to be desired. I have found it hard to find past documents, images, graphics, etc. But honestly part of that could be just how our team names those folders and files. While the My Collections function is great, the Following and My Selections functions seem redundant. Another downside is that the shareable links that we use to share the content with outside clients does expire. I know this is for security, but if the client does not access the content in a timely fashion, which happens often, then we have to resend it.

Great product at a great price!

I priced a number of different applications including Canto. After doing a valuations on a product they narrowed it down to three, Canto being one of the three. After reviewing the other products and Canto I found that Canto provided for more capabilities it is substantially reduced cost. Canto has helped us to improve our ability to deliver contents to a very large Group of individuals within the university. This product has helped us to broaden our ability to share a message in a very powerful way.

Pros

This product helps us to deliver video in high-resolution images rapidly. In the past, this was a very time-consuming process but Canto has allowed us to create an amazing solution. As a result, we're able to deploy web and social media solutions dynamically as needed. This product helps us to deliver video and high-resolution images rapidly. In the past, this was a very time-consuming process but Canto has allowed us to create an amazing solution. As a result, we're able to deploy web and social media solutions dynamically as needed.

Cons

It took a little bit of time to understand the structure of the software, but after going through the deployment and using it I had a better understanding of it. Some of the features related to users and permissions within subdirectories were a little challenging to understand.

Saves time - very easy to collaborate + share and receive files online

Pros

Several features have really simplified my photo management role. Metadata is customizable to your needs - and while it takes careful thought initially, when set up is easy to apply. 'Upload links' allow outside people to add photography directly to the system in a controlled manner - this has significantly helped with timeliness and ease of receiving photography. I love the branding portal, and the versioning capabilities. I also love the Facial Recognition feature - no more tagging the same people over and over. The company consistently improves the software and innovates - releasing frequent feature updates.

Cons

While it is fairly intuitive, there are aspects (of the portals for example) that need to be explained to a new user - this can be time consuming. I have been frustrated that new features are sometimes expensive paid add-ons, even when they were discussed as 'coming' during the research process (features I thought would be included with upcoming releases). As much as possible, try to envision future features you will need and consider that in your contract discussions.

The best bang for your buck if starting out

Prior to Canto, all of our marketing material used to reside on a shared drive accessible within the organization network. All brand manager would own folders within which they stored marketing assets - images, brochures, videos, 3D assets. This caused issues because - a) Simple folders = no tagging = very hard to search for assets; b) No version control, approval history, and random nomenclature made it hard to identify which asset to use even if found c) No access outside the organization, so could not be used remotely or shared with 3rd party partners and agencies; people would use wetransfer each time. d) Significant duplication of content, obsolescence, and storage consumption With Canto, all of the above get solved. We could enable access permissions to control modification, set up portals to share assets externally permanently, reduce storage with dedupes, and setup version control and a standardized folder structure and process. While this helped bring in significant efficiencies in process, the real win was in content management, tremendously reducing incidence or incorrect imagery used, safer, faster, and more effective development of ads and digital assets, and ensuring content quality.

Pros

Ease of single uploads, tagging to enable search, multi-folder assignment, deduplication, portal creation

Cons

Difficulty in bulk upload, downloading buggy, no mobile app version

We love Canto

Very simple and straight forward. No surprises. Friendly and fast to respond customer service who go above and beyond to ensure we have the best user experience possible. What you see is what you get and I couldn't be happier.

Pros

It's a visual, web-based DAM that is incredibly easy to use and assessable from anywhere. Canto is incredibly fast and responsive, with all sorts of plug ins and extensions to integrate your favorite browser, file transfer site or software application (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premier). The Portals & User Permissions allow a lot of fine tuning to ensure each user or team has access to only the assets they should. The admin controls couldn't be easier to use, making managing access through the system a total breeze. The simplicity is and emphasize on clean visuals really puts Canto above most other platforms we've used or demonstrated. Highly recommend others take the time to see what Canto offers and how your company can benefit from what it does best.

Cons

I don't have any, to be honest. Though it would be nice if a standalone application for advanced management existed, similar to how the Advanced Uploader application makes uploading large batches of files easier - would be nice if I could perform backups, re-arranging assets, etc. through an application for complex tasks. It's not essential, but I would absolutely be able to leverage something like that since mass re-organizing albums and assets through a browser can be sluggish and difficult.

A Good DAM Solution

We originally used personal hard drives and shared network drives for our asset management. Working with vendors for graphics was done via email. We've been able to transfer most of that over to Canto now. A week after launching Canto, HR came to use looking for photos of colleagues. Previously this would've taken hours to find what they were after. However, the AI Smart Tagging made it very easy to do a search for "people", then we added a couple of filters. Within minutes we had hundreds of photos that we sent to HR.

Pros

Interface is very intuitive. There is a really good balance between having a turnkey solution and being able to customize things. Custom tags and multiple ways of tagging assets was my biggest priority. There were a few solutions that provided more customization, but would've required more oversight as well. Our small team didn't have the bandwidth for that. Ability to create portals and upload links has been a gamechanger for us in asset distribution and collection. Just hosted a large community fundraiser. We gave each photographer an upload link with the option of some quick tags. We had thousands of images tagged and uploaded into the platform effortlessly. This used to be very time consuming for us.

Cons

Facial recognition is pretty weak. They are the larger customer of AWS facial recognition tool. If Canto switched to Google's tool, I feel it'd be much more reliable and function the way it's intended to. As of now, we just opt not to use it. Support could do a better job at recognizing the shortcomings of their product and recommending product enhancements. I often have to request multiple times for something to be an enhancement. I haven't had any follow-up yet, so not sure if they're going to implement things though.

Robust features and multiple ways of access

What do you like best? The flexibility of deployment and implementation was paramount for our organization, as we ended up hosting the solution on premise due to our large file sizes. We love how the metadata is written back to the asset. Additionally, the various ways to access the assets through the web, through apps or through a desktop client made the user adoption go very smoothly. What do you dislike? Customizing the software during the installation and implementation phase was more time consuming than we had anticipated and with the new releases of software and portals we have encountered some delays and hiccups (we are working through them). Out of the "box" reporting is significantly lacking compared to the other options, but you can buy a 3rd party addin for that. What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized? The visibility on where are assets have gone and where they are going is greatly increased, in addition to increasing the visibility of knowing what assets we have while enabling a strong search functionality has decreased duplication of assets and increased productivity and efficiency.

Pros

The flexibility of deployment and implementation was paramount for our organization, as we ended up hosting the solution on premise due to our large file sizes. We love how the metadata is written back to the asset. Additionally, the various ways to access the assets through the web, through apps or through a desktop client made the user adoption go very smoothly.

Cons

Customizing the software during the installation and implementation phase was more time consuming than we had anticipated and with the new releases of software and portals we have encountered some delays and hiccups (we are working through them). Out of the "box" reporting is significantly lacking compared to the other options, but you can buy a 3rd party addin for that.

Robust features and multiple ways of access

What do you like best? The flexibility of deployment and implementation was paramount for our organization, as we ended up hosting the solution on premise due to our large file sizes. We love how the metadata is written back to the asset. Additionally, the various ways to access the assets through the web, through apps or through a desktop client made the user adoption go very smoothly. What do you dislike? Customizing the software during the installation and implementation phase was more time consuming than we had anticipated and with the new releases of software and portals we have encountered some delays and hiccups (we are working through them). Out of the "box" reporting is significantly lacking compared to the other options, but you can buy a 3rd party addin for that. What business problems are you solving? What benefits have you realized? The visibility on where are assets have gone and where they are going is greatly increased, in addition to increasing the visibility of knowing what assets we have while enabling a strong search functionality has decreased duplication of assets and increased productivity and efficiency.

Pros

The flexibility of deployment and implementation was paramount for our organization, as we ended up hosting the solution on premise due to our large file sizes. We love how the metadata is written back to the asset. Additionally, the various ways to access the assets through the web, through apps or through a desktop client made the user adoption go very smoothly.

Cons

Customizing the software during the installation and implementation phase was more time consuming than we had anticipated and with the new releases of software and portals we have encountered some delays and hiccups (we are working through them). Out of the "box" reporting is significantly lacking compared to the other options, but you can buy a 3rd party addin for that.

Honest review of Canto

We've had a good experience with Canto. The best part is the company listens to its users and creates new features based off of the input. I have been responsible for a number of features in recent releases.

Pros

Canto is very well designed and easy to navigate.

Cons

Everything can always be cheaper, but Canto prices are competitive.

Canto makes DAM a breeze

Canto has allowed our organization to better manage our digital assets, which in turn saves time and money. It can be extremely time consuming searching for images on a shared drive, but the search and tagging function on Canto helps our employees to be able to find images quick and efficiently. Sharing photos with external partners and stakeholders also used to be time consuming, but now we are able to share photos instantaneously through the share link or through the partner portal, allowing for external partners to feel like they are in the loop.

Pros

Canto was extremely easy to implement into our business. Previously, we stored all of our photos/videos/files on the shared drive, external hard drives and servers. Canto has allowed us to ensure all employees who require access to digital assets have access to them, regardless if they are at the office or not. We really like the convenient options for sharing files with external stakeholders, especially the sharing link. It eliminates the need to upload files to dropbox and worry about storage issues.

Cons

No cons. Each time I have had a technical issue, the Canto support staff has helped me very quickly and ensured my problem was fixed.

Working smarter not harder!

We are just getting started with Canto but LOVE it! We have over 15,000 assets uploaded to our system to-date and have only been using the product since March 1, 2020. Every day we are learning some new functions of Canto and how to better organize and tag our assets to make magic happen! Canto is worth the cost and I'm excited to keep exploring all the functions it has to offer to us and our clients!

Pros

I love Canto's Facial recognition feature! We have a lot of assets where we need to identify people and facial recognition has changed everything! now we can search for people by name and access every photo asset we have of that person! Game changer! I also love being able to relate files and add custom fields to assets. This has come in so handy when we need to connect people's images to their stories and FOIP information. Canto has really helped us work smarter and not harder to find all of the assets we have in a more dynamic way!

Cons

We have found the uploading of assets to be a little more work than anticipated. The Canto Connect desktop application is helpful but when initially setting up out canto product it is a lot of work. When you have over 20,000 assets to upload it takes a team of people to make that happen and a good amount of time to get everything uploaded.

User-friendly, Secure, Dynamic

Right from the start, the user-friendly nature of the platform ensures that all users, whether trained in asset management and best-practices or not, will be able to explore our content in a dynamic fashion, with very little training necessary to get their bearings. From a seamless upload/download process to an intuitive tagging and keyword system, Canto allows its Administrators full control during the process, including the option to customize additional metadata facets as needed, offering you and your team a curated experience. Canto has revolutionized the way that we store, tag, organize, and share our digital assets while at the same time securing their future integrity. The customer care has been excellent, and the Canto team is committed and engaged at all times.

Pros

Canto's user-friendly interface allows for an easy, intuitive platform to host, organize, and share all of our digital assets. Having something that is so intuitive puts all team members at ease, and increases their implementation of the platform in their day-to-day work.

Cons

Canto divides its users between three levels: Admin, Collaborator, and Consumer. There is very little that you can't do in Canto. A fully customizable experience for Administrative and Collaborator level users means a great deal of your DAM needs are met. I do feel that the Consumer-level experience can be expanded further, for example: with regards to facial recognition, a Consumer-level user is more than capable of identifying faces within a photograph, but the current constraints of the consumer level does not allow for this level of data input. Overall, this dynamic spark of the Canto platform is sometimes lost at the Consumer-level.

Good product for the price.

Generally a good program. Doesn't always work seamlessly and in exactly the ways we would want it to, however, Canto has provided our company with important capabilities for our price point and are responsive when we have issues that arise.

Pros

- Easy/intuitive layout and general interface that allows users to search via a search bar or through a more traditional folder layout. - Branding Customization - Customization of the tags/categories to our specifications (custom fields) - Very responsive to feature requests and program is updated with new additions frequently - Curated views allow us to "sort" our photos in an order that makes most sense within an album. - IT support is very responsive to issues. Makes sure to follow up with you to make sure things are functioning correctly.

Cons

- Integration has been somewhat challenging figuring out how to get the searches to yield results in the specific ways we want. - Wish there were more specific/fined tuned permissions for individual users beyond the main 3 categories - Facial Recognition doesn't work that well and in fact we have stopped trying to use it. Sometimes the photos will be almost exactly the same (head shots for example) and it doesn’t recognize them as the same person or will misidentify. The interface when it comes to both applying and searching through names is also very clunky. Smart Tags – Have not been relevant for our business since most of our photos are of events not products we well. Our smart tags identify things like "human" "clothing" "accessories" which has no relevance to what people of our company will search. We end up having to go in and put in the tags manually.