Digital asset management for government

A department produces images constantly. Ministerial visits, public consultations, campaign shoots, infrastructure part-built, staff at work. Most of it lands on a shared drive named after whoever set it up, and a good deal of it shows members of the public who were told it was for one particular purpose.

Two things then get hard at the same time. Finding the right photograph for a publication takes a morning of asking colleagues who might still have it. And establishing whether you are allowed to use it takes longer than that, because the consent — if anyone collected it — is in the inbox of the press officer who ran the shoot and has since moved department.

Neither is urgent until it is: an information request arrives, a photograph appears in a campaign it was never cleared for, or the person in it asks for it to come down and nobody can say where it has gone.

The work looks the same. The difference is that each of these questions now has an answer that takes seconds:

• Who is in this photograph, and what did they agree to?
• Which images can go in the annual report, and which cannot?
• Who has downloaded this file since we published it?
• What do we hold that shows this site before the works started?
• What should have been deleted by now, and has it been?

Consent that has expired takes the image out of circulation on its own, rather than depending on somebody remembering the date. And when a member of the public withdraws, the photographs covered by that consent are locked in the same action — including for anyone holding a share link.