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Real Estate Marketing Company Consolidating Adobe Lightroom and Local RAID Storage
Company Situation
The company is a marketing communications team within a regional real estate association. Their team is small, comprising two core video professionals and a handful of additional users for broader digital asset management needs. They manage a growing volume of video and photographic content, currently totaling approximately 12 terabytes of video footage and regularly requiring around 2 terabytes of active editing storage. Their broader team includes up to six users who may need access to digital assets, including photography, for marketing and communications purposes.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company stores all video footage on local drives (e.g., RAID or external drives) that sit physically at their desks. Their editing process involves manually digging through these drives to locate footage, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. Photography is primarily handled by an external vendor, with some internal use of Adobe Lightroom for headshots. The team lacks a centralized, searchable digital asset management (DAM) system, relying heavily on manual file management and physical storage.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Significant time spent locating archival video assets during quarterly leadership requests for content compilations.
Difficulty maintaining and accessing AI-generated metadata tags across active and archived footage.
Reliance on physical drives creates risk of data loss and inefficiency, coupled with slow IT support for new storage solutions.
Lack of an integrated DAM for both video and photography assets, making cross-team collaboration and searchability challenging.
No scalable or cloud-based archival workflow, complicating long-term storage and active project management.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a cloud-native platform that seamlessly integrates active project storage and archival workflows with AI-powered metadata tagging. By mounting virtual drives locally, the team can access original resolution files directly within their editing environments without duplicating data. Shade’s Vault Drive feature ensures that archived footage remains fully searchable with all AI tags intact, eliminating the need for manual digging. Additionally, Shade supports a unique Lightroom integration allowing photography catalogs to be linked and searchable within the platform, streamlining workflows for internal photography use. The platform scales with the team’s needs, offering a Growth plan that fits their current user count and storage requirements without the overhead of enterprise features like single sign-on.
Benefits
- Centralized, cloud-based storage accessible via mounted drives for streamlined editing workflows.
- Persistent AI metadata tags across active and archived footage enable rapid search and retrieval.
- Scalable solution accommodating both video and photography assets in a single platform.
- Unique Lightroom catalog integration providing enhanced accessibility for photography workflows.
- Reduced dependency on physical drives and manual file management.
- Faster turnaround on leadership content requests with searchable archives.
- Flexible licensing aligned with current team size and potential to scale.
Technologies Used
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