Extensis Reviews: 4.0/5 — Solid Choice

Portfolio has an intuitive UI for non-technical users, but provides our team the ability to get very granular in how we administer our assets.

Automatic syncs aren't always reliable and there can be some discrepancies on what's on the server vs. what appears in Portfolio.

We needed a digital asset management system that integrated with MS active directory that would allow us to assign privileges to catalogs based on international regions. We've now moved off of using shared drives and Dropbox for storage and sharing.

Fast image search and retrieval. Image download and conversion. Image gallery sharing via NetPublish. Allows more than 1 catalog. Extensis IT is very helpful in answering questions. Onsite implementation IT are very proficient.

2016 version does not preserve transparency when converting format. 2016 runs in flash.

Image search-internal and external. push images to other areas of the enterprise. publish galleries for business partners. Business partners can change format and size for their needs.

We had 62,000-some digital assets when we installed Portfolio in 2013 - mostly photos. I'd been wrangling photos from multiple sources, and our users had been renaming files so they could record the details of an image. Extensis Portfolio made it easy to assign keywords, captions, and other details. I like being able to quickly create a gallery of images and generate a PDF. I also love the ability to batch rename files - or resize. We recently added the NetPublish feature to add the ability to share galleries with others within our network who don't have access to Portfolio.

We now have multiple catalogs (one for marketing photos, one for events, one for archive, one for confidential) and our users want to be able to search across the catalogs. Our users also seem to have problems with search requiring quotes around a name. (Otherwise, a search for John [space] Smith returns all photos tagged with John and all photos tagged with Smith.) I wish that if I chose to move a folder from one catalog to another, it would move the folder itself and not just the assets inside. The zoom is not as clear as the one on Adobe Bridge, so it can be hard to read peoples' name tags, for example, which would be handy for tagging. I have a bad habit of logging in and doing a search, and then closing the browser window and needing to start over, but I don't know how Extensis could fix that. I liked the product better when it had a desktop version - it was easier to link images in InDesign. The web-only option can be frustrating. Lastly, although this is great for photos, I expect there are better products for managing video.

We work with photos from across an entire academic health center. Extensis Portfolio helps us find, organize and tag files and is especially helpful when we need to remove a photo from our collection. It's helpful for tagging subjects so we know whether they are a patient, a model, a volunteer, etc. We purchased it to help manage patient photos and releases to make sure we weren't violating HIPAA law.

The keywording options are very well implemented.

The editing and uploading side is flash based so our users have trouble accessing it at times and weird glitches.

It helps us collect photos from a volunteer ministry at the church into one useable place.

What I like best is the way Portfolio makes it easy to catalog items, create web galleries, and manage metadata.

What I dislike is performance issues that you see when your catalogs get really big (1 million + assets). Make sure you ask the right questions to the right people at Extensis when you are planning your system. The posted requirements would work fine for a small deployment, but across an enterprise, you will need a consultation to assure you will have a setup to handle your needs.

Portfolio allows for our photographers to quickly catalog their images and provide the customer with their finished images quickly, through a Netpublish site. It allows our archivist to add important metadata to images and publish a library of images for use across the enterprise. It allows various groups to provide access to event photos. The best part of this is it eliminates the duplication of images by keeping all of the images centrally located while allowing the images to be used in multiple ways.

Extensis has done a lot of work to this product over the years. We started using the product over 15 years ago. Excellent at want it does. Worked really well at keeping the filesystem and the database in sync. It's ability to "archive" assets when removed from the file system was of great help to us.

It's ability to customize sites were a bit of a chore. If you wanted something that strayed from the templates you need you use their APIs. The API was pretty well documented. But it was not something the casual user could do.

This product worked real well for us (a small internal creative group). It kept track of our assets was easy to use from an end user perspective. It saved a great deal of time in finding assets both on disk and DVD. Using the APIs we were able to present assets with a terms and condition check box before the asset was available.

Ease of use / not cumbersome to use Great search capabilities Smart galleries based on search results NetPublish

Dependence on Flash (a huge drawback) No support for multi-page PDF documents Pretty costly iPhone app was last updated in 2015 No iPad support

We are a design school and due to the volume of digital content we are dealing with on a daily basis it is essential to have a reliable tool to manage all this data. We use Extensis internally in the Administration to archive, share assets and make them available for Programmes Office, PR, Marketing and Information Resources and soon plan to integrate Extensis in our curriculum as we appreciate the need for our students to be better prepared for their future workplace where effective digital asset management and teamwork is key.

Very useful to make one single media library from different ones. Easy to manage and to integrate with AD.

Galleries are only catalog specific. Should be better if they could be crossed on all catalogs. Few problems when we upgraded to newer version.

Assets centralization decreases search times and productivity. All marketing departments are now well connected to share medias and infos.

I like that I'm able to organize all photo and video assets into one central location and have the ability to distribute only selected items to clients. I also like the ease with which I can add/update metadata for the assets. And I love the new video playback in Portfolio 2016.

I have been using Portfolio since 2008. I became very accustomed to using the desktop client. What I loved about that (which is something that the current Porfolio doesn't offer) is that I was able to see ALL assets in a given catalog on ONE page. Now I am only able to see a maxium of 500 assets per page. Now that Portfolio is 100% net-based, it is way slower than the old desktop client. I also don't like that NetPublish does not offer the option for user to download smaller sizes (they way you can at Shutterstock.com, for example). We use large high-resolution photos for print marketing, but these huge files are not good for our sales team who insert JPEG files into Word documents. In the old version, they would copy/paste the image from the details page, which is no longer allowed. If they could download smaller files, the reporting function for which images have been downloaded would be a lot more accurate.

We use Portfolio NetPublish to distribute our photo/video assets to our 54 offices around the world and to travel agents, press, and media. We would have a much harder time doing this without Portfolio. The benefit of having all our assets in one central location from which they can be easily distributed is vital to our business.

Portfolio is a great search tool, I love the way it uses your keywords to intuitively search in the 'quick find' panel. Its also great that you can collect images and create PDFs quickly and easily. A pleasure to use.

The only problems I have are to do with inserting the description and punctuation. Portfolio seems to dislike paragraph/line breaks in the description and it takes ages to go back and add them in again - it takes two attempts - you cant just cut and paste a description which is annoying. We also had some problems with punctuation when transferring over our old catalogues but to be fair to extensis, they came in and took lots of time and effort to sort it out.

Portfolio has completely changed the way we search our databases and there is lots of scope to roll it out to other areas of the practice. I am developing new databases for the rest of the practice to use.