A picture is worth a thousand words and in the landscape industry, they can be one of your best selling points to potential clients. If you’ve taken the time to hire a professional photographer to capture some of your beautiful landscapes, or if you are capturing these images yourself on the job, the last thing you want is for them to be lost when you need them.
There are plenty of photo management software options out there, so this is by no means an exhaustive list but if you’re looking for some ways to better organize, locate and share your images, check out some of these options.
When considering the different software, pay attention to costs of the next tier up for photo storage as you want to make sure this is an affordable choice that will work for your company long-term.
Dropbox
A well-known file and photo storage option is Dropbox. Dropbox can serve as your online filing cabinet as you set the folder structure and organization system. Teams can be given access to shared folders and different permissions control whether users can view or edit the files.
One particularly beneficial feature for Dropbox Professional and Business level users is its image search technology. If you are searching for a firepit photo and failed to change the file name from 2021-10-31 1.934.54.jpg to something more descriptive, typing in ‘firepit’ will pull up the best matches from your files. Dropbox has different tiers starting at $15 per user per month for 5 TB. Larger organizations can contact sales for pricing and as much space as needed.
Google Photos
If your business already uses some of Google’s other offerings, Google Photos could be a natural fit. Photos are automatically organized and searchable, so they are easier to find. Google Photos also allows you to back up your photos and access them on any device.
All Google accounts include 15 GB of free storage, but there are basic, standard and premium storage options as well, starting from $1.99 a month for 100 GB to $9.99 a month for 2 TB.
Flickr
If you’re looking to organize your polished portfolio photos, Flickr might be a good fit for you. Flickr is an image hosting service that is designed for the sharing of photos. You can organize your project photos in albums and add tags as well. You can also sort the pictures by the date taken. While Flickr’s platform is meant for photos to be seen by others you can set the viewing privacy to private if some of the photos you want to store are for internal purposes.
One of the greatest benefits of Flickr Pro is the unlimited storage. The Pro account also provides advanced statistics and automatic backups. The monthly price for Flickr Pro is $8.25, plus tax or $71.99, plus tax for an annual subscription.
Canto
If you’re a much larger landscaping company whose marketing team is always stuck digging for assets in disorganized piles of photos, Canto is a robust system that can meet your needs. It creates a fully searchable library by name, dates, dimensions or any other criteria.
When assets are uploaded, Canto places them in a Smart Album that is easy to navigate. You can even set expiration dates so outdated collateral is never used by your sales or marketing team by mistake. Pricing for Canto varies as it’s customizable, but it starts anywhere from $8,000 to $15,000.
CompanyCam
If you’re looking for more of a photo management option that helps keep track of a jobsite’s pictures in real time, consider CompanyCam. You can add comments, circle problem areas and communicate with your crew directly on each photo. You can send quick photo reports and before and afters to clients through the app as well.
This platform allows you to automatically label and organize your jobsite photos rather than having to collect, upload and organize them after a project has been completed. CompanyCam’s photo feed shows you every picture taken, the instant it’s taken, while the project feed organizes photos by the latest project. You can search for images by projects, users, groups and comments.
CompanyCam offers unlimited cloud storage and the Pro account starts at $16 per user per month when billed annually.
