Efficient media management in Perfion supports the great buying experience

Effective media management is crucial for many companies. In the effort to provide customers with the best digital buying experience, media increasingly plays a key role in enabling customers to assess the functionality, quality, and aesthetics of your products.

New formats, presentation options, and channels are continuously emerging, all of which need to be supported with images and media in various sizes, resolutions, with more or less text, and so on.

To succeed in providing good, accurate, and informative images of your products, you must also be able to work efficiently and purposefully with onboarding, enrichment, and publishing of media.

With Perfion’s combination of the two Perfion services - Storage Service and Media Services - you get a powerful solution to manage and deliver your digital assets to your customers.

Features like watermarks and image focus also give you the ability to protect and personalize your visual assets.

Perfion’s Storage Service is an independent web service designed to manage binary data such as images and files.

The data is stored in the cloud via Azure Blob Storage (ABS), ensuring high availability and scalability. Service functions such as storing, retrieving, deleting, and caching binary data are handled efficiently. This provides your solution with strong performance and ensures that your Perfion system does not get overwhelmed when handling the often heavier media files you may be working with.

This service is unique to each customer and protected via an API key, which can be managed through the user-friendly Storage Service GUI. The GUI also allows configuration of both Storage Service and Media Services, making it easy to tailor the solution to the company’s specific needs.

Running alongside Storage Service is Media Services, whose primary function is the management of files and images. Media Services in Perfion enable fast and efficient delivery of visual assets across your channels and act as a bridge between the storage infrastructure and the end user.

A key benefit you gain with Media Services is that these media services do not require direct connection to the Perfion database. They rely solely on the binary data in Asset Cloud Storage. This prevents your Perfion system from overheating and instead allows you to enjoy more stable operations.

• Scalability and flexibility: By moving storage to cloud-based services like ABS, Perfion’s solution can grow with your company’s needs without compromising performance.
• Seamless integration: The transition between different storage solutions (local database to cloud) is designed to be smooth, with no disruptions to operations.
• User-friendliness: The Storage Service GUI provides administrators with an intuitive tool to manage settings, API keys, and status monitoring.
• Security: With API protection and access control, companies can be confident that their data is well secured.

Beyond basic functions such as storing, retrieving, and deleting binary data, the system offers advanced options to optimize and personalize image files. Two key features in this context are watermarks and image focus, both contributing to increased control over visual assets.

The watermark feature in Perfion enables protection of images managed via Media Services. The feature is designed to apply a watermark to images that meet specific criteria, such as size or resolution.

• Watermark setup:
  Watermarks can be configured through the Storage Service GUI, where you can upload a desired watermark file and specify a watermark range in pixels. This range defines when the watermark should be applied:
• If an image exceeds the defined width or height, the watermark is automatically added.
• A value of 1 means all images will have a watermark applied.
• Negative or 0 values disable the watermark feature.
• Benefits of watermarks:
• Branding: Ensures images displayed externally are clearly marked with the company’s logo or name.
• Security: Reduces the risk of unauthorized use of images.

Another useful feature is image focus, which allows optimization of image presentation within Perfion’s Media Services. This feature ensures that the focal point of the image is always centered in the display - even when the image or frame is scaled or cropped.

Features:

• Automatic focus and adjustment: Media Services can use metadata from the Perfion database to identify and maintain important parts of the image, such as a product or a person’s face. This is especially useful for webshops or catalogs where product images need to adapt to different screen and print sizes as well as various print formats.
• Manual image editing: For images requiring precise adjustment, administrators can manually define focus areas via Perfion’s API or Storage Service GUI.
• Benefits of image focus:
  • Personalized experience: Ensures images display optimally across platforms
  • Increased efficiency: Reduces the need for manual image editing.

Perfion also includes additional customization options that enhance the management of media files:

• Cache settings: Optimizes performance by enabling caching for frequently used images and files.
• “No image found” images: Defines a default image file that is displayed if a requested image is not available. This ensures a consistent user experience and avoids empty placeholders.
• Automatic transition to cloud: When setting up Asset Cloud, the system ensures a seamless migration of data without interruptions.

In Perfion, rules can be configured to ensure that images meet specific requirements. For example, rules can be set regarding color profiles, image type, and resolution. Perfion can automatically read this metadata and ensure that images comply with the company’s standards. Examples of metadata include:

• RGB color profile
• Camera information
• Image dimensions.

All of this is recorded in a database, where it is possible to get an in-depth overview of each image.

During installation, Storage Service and Media Services are configured through the GUI, which provides access to key parameters such as API keys and URLs.

When changing the storage location for data in Perfion, the process is secure and stepwise. Data is copied to the new location and only deleted from the old one once the migration is complete. Throughout the entire process, Perfion remains fully operational.

A unified platform for media management

With Storage Service and Media Services, Perfion offers a complete solution for managing media files. By combining cloud-based technology with intuitive administration tools, companies can streamline their workflows, reduce complexity, and ensure optimal performance in their media management.

This approach provides companies with a robust, future-proof platform that supports growth and evolving needs.