Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria Migrate to SaaS DAM Canto

The Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Victoria faced difficulties managing an extensive and growing collection of digital assets across its various departments. With over 167,000 images, mostly botanical, and a smaller number of videos, the organisation struggled to maintain efficient workflows using no-longer-supported on-premise DAM system and ad-hoc asset storage and management.

The Challenge

The scientific teams had been using Canto's legacy on-premise DAM solution Cumulus for over 10 years, but the platform became increasingly difficult to support, especially as the asset collection grew and the system failed to scale with their needs. The marketing team, along with the events and signage departments, had been relying on OneDrive for asset storage, which was inefficient and ill-suited for organising large amounts of content with detailed metadata.

The lack of a centralised platform for asset management created confusion across teams, with marketing overwhelmed by metadata and settings irrelevant to their needs. Additionally, the manual process of managing metadata and assets led to delays and inefficiencies. RBG needed a modern, scalable, and user-friendly solution to organise and access their digital assets more effectively.

Canto has already made a big difference for our marketing team. The AI features, like facial recognition, are fantastic, and they’ve helped us organise our marketing assets more effectively.

The Solution

RBG initially adopted Canto for their scientific teams, recognising the need for a more efficient digital asset management system to handle their large collection of botanical images. Niels Klazenga, Biodiversity Informatics Developer at RBG, played a key role in transitioning the scientific teams to Canto, where they benefited from the platform’s AI-powered image tagging and automated metadata management features. These capabilities made it easier for the team to organise and categorise images of plant species, significantly improving the searchability of their collection.

The migration to Canto was smooth, with the scientific teams quickly adopting the platform’s robust features. Canto’s AI-based tagging automatically recognised species and objects within images, allowing for more efficient cataloging of botanical assets and faster retrieval of images based on specific criteria. The platform’s single sign-on (SSO) feature allowed seamless access across the organisation, ensuring that other departments could join the system with ease.

As Canto proved successful for the scientific teams, the marketing, events, and signage departments began adopting the platform. James Robbins, part of the marketing team, was nominated as the lead for implementing Canto in his department. Although the marketing team had been using OneDrive for years, they recognised the need for a more centralised platform with better organisation and search capabilities. James and his team received training from Brayden at databasics, and while the team is still in the process of fully onboarding, they have already seen improvements in their workflow.

One of the main challenges for the marketing team was navigating the large amount of metadata that applied to the entire organisation, which wasn’t tailored to their specific needs. James expressed a desire for more user-specific settings in Canto, so that his team could focus on the metadata relevant to their marketing work without being overwhelmed by other teams’ requirements. Canto’s Portals feature was highlighted as a potential solution, allowing James to create dedicated spaces for marketing assets and ensure more efficient organisation within the platform.

The Results

The adoption of Canto has already delivered significant benefits across RBG. For the scientific teams, the integration of Canto’s AI-powered image tagging has simplified the process of organising botanical images, allowing for easier categorisation and faster retrieval of assets. Niels praised Canto for its robust metadata management, which has improved the searchability and accessibility of their vast image library.

Canto has been a great solution for our scientific teams. The AI-powered tagging features have been invaluable for organising and tagging our botanical images.

For the marketing, events, and signage departments, Canto has provided a centralised solution for managing assets that was previously fragmented across multiple platforms. While the full transition is still underway, James and his team have already experienced the ease of use and improved search functionality. The ability to automate tagging, especially for images containing faces or objects, has significantly reduced manual effort and improved asset organization.

RBG has also benefited from Canto’s single sign-on (SSO) integration, allowing for seamless access across departments without the need for multiple logins. The system’s flexibility and ease of use have made it easier to manage licenses, ensuring that all departments can access and collaborate on assets without issues.

We've seen a significant improvement in how we manage our assets, and the transition was much smoother than expected. Canto has made asset management more efficient, and we’re excited to continue using it.

What's next

RBG plans to continue expanding the use of Canto across more departments within the organisation. The marketing team will undergo additional training to complete their onboarding, and they are particularly interested in further exploring Canto Portals and Workspaces to create dedicated spaces for marketing assets. James is also keen to explore more user-specific settings in Canto to better tailor the platform to the marketing team’s needs.

The scientific teams will continue to leverage Canto’s AI tagging capabilities, and Niels is excited to explore new features and integrations that could enhance their workflows. With the ability to automate tasks like cold storage for large files and simplify metadata management, RBG is well-positioned to scale their asset management system across the entire organisation.