Pre Purchase: A few question on IMatch Anywhere features

[hus]

We research DAM options for a (very) small team in different locations. From reading the docs and this forum, I understood that IMatch is a single-user app and that there is no practical way to collaborate on live-databases. For remote access, there is IMatch Anywhere, which offers great search and filtering options, but seems mostly be there for media consumption and distribution.

Is there somewhere a complete feature description of IMatch Anywhere? I found a mention that one may edit metadata and put assets to categories with Imatch Anywhere. What about renaming files? Can remote users add / upload new files to a folder for Imatch to ingest? Forgive me, if I missed a resource – but I found no answer to these questions in the IMatch Anywhere documentation.

[Mario]

Hi, welcome to the community.

IMatch Anywhere is by-design mostly for viewing and searching files. Authorized users with sufficient privileges can edit metadata, rating, labels, collections and categories remotely, in their web browser using the file lens feature.

No file system operations like uploading, adding, deleting or renaming files are supported by IMatch Anywhere yet. The database and its contents are maintained with the IMatch Windows application.

This matches the typical needs of the target audience for IMatch Anywhere. An easy to deploy solution with low maintenance for a very affordable price tag. Maybe future versions of IMatch Anywhere will do more. But there is a reason why IMatch Anywhere costs only 50 bucks and commercial corporate DAMs can easily cost 50,000US$ per year. Or hundred or so US$ per user per month.

If you need more features than IMatch Anywhere currently offers, have look at the on-premise or cloud-based DAM software  offered by companies like Canto, FotoWare, Extensis, AssetBank, Bynder, DAMinion, Widen and others.

See Capterra (https://www.capterra.com/digital-asset-management-software/) for a comprehensive overview of current DAM software (no affiliation).

Apparently, DAM vendors don't list prices on their web sites anymore (which is usually not a good sign). But you can ask for a demo and pricing information. Their pre-sales teams will contact you and analyze your requirements.
If your team size is small, the total annual cost should be manageable.

[hus]

Thank you for your quick and pleasantly unbiased response, Mario! I was already expecting this outcome – I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

In fact, for the past few weeks, I've been expending unreasonable effort ploughing through the DAM landscape, regarding viability and affordability for distributed mini-teams.

The result is devastating. Almost all "serious" products are aimed at Enterprises. Those that technically have a low entry barrier are Cloud Only – which is impractical with large source files. If the provider offers On Premise + Cloud, four digits for setup / onboarding are immediately added on the taximeter...

You already stated not posting costs on websites is a bad sign – the DAM industry seems to have invariably committed to that. I swallowed the toad with one of the providers you mentioned previously and got an offer...

Well... (cough, cough) these vendors are seemingly highly optimistic about the ROI of their product... It was utterly out of range for us.

Then there are numerous nicely styled Dropbox clones for Designers. Almost needless to say, they all use proprietary metadata and provide an outstanding software lock-in. Some don't even recognize pre-existing metadata (and offer reading it in at an extra fee on the Enterprise-SAAS plan .

I can confidently summarize: The market for a professional DAM for small teams, with low complexity and at manageable cost is completely idle. Maybe a reason to readjust your priorities? PM is open

But first, best of luck for your 2023 release! Even if we don't become customers for now, IMatch is a fantastic project.

👋 Holger

[Mario]

Thank you for your quick and pleasantly unbiased response, Mario!

I tell people how it is. I don't want to lure people into buying IMatch or IMA if it won't work for them.
I prefer my customers to be satisfied and happy. Yes, I'm old school. I know.

I can confidently summarize: The market for a professional DAM for small teams, with low complexity and at manageable cost is completely idle. Maybe a reason to readjust your priorities? PM is open

That what was I had expected. You've outlined the DAM landscape very well.

IMatch is my main product and concern.

IMatch Anywhere does a very good job for users who need an easy-to-maintain and affordable way to share IMatch database contents between multiple users, on all platforms.
The ability to edit metadata, collections and categories is designed for the "many users view, search, review and comment, some users maintain the database" use-case, which is typical for the IMatch Anywhere user base.

IMatch Anywhere is still on version 2019 because it uses a much more long-term and stable ESR release cycle - because this is what most users want. There are virtually no feature requests and zip bug reports - it just works.

Enhancing it to support more corporate-grade features for small teams does not make sense at this time. It would require a truly massive amount of work and then trying to recoup the cost in a market that is already saturated.

To share documents, source codes, files etc. for small teams there are things like SharePoint or GitHub.
If one needs a true DAM with proper metadata support, there are over 100 DAM vendors to choose from already. All with big teams and deep pockets. Nothing I could compete with.

I don't know the current prices, but the last time I've checked the cloud-based offerings started at about 100US$ per user per month, plus cloud storage fee per GB used. Often the storage fee is what really generates money for them. Which is why there is usually a heavy surcharge for on-premise (bring your own storage) installations. I can understand that. Developing and maintaining software is expensive.

I hope you'll find a solution that works for your team.