Once assets live in one system, that system knows things nobody could previously establish: which images are actually used, which cost money to produce and were never downloaded again, what a client looked at after a meeting, and how much storage is being spent on copies of the same photograph. Reporting is where that knowledge becomes available, and it turns a library from a filing system into something that answers questions about itself.
The audit report records activity across the platform and can be filtered by date range and by individual user. Activity falls into categories that between them cover the meaningful events in an asset's life:
One distinction is worth understanding, because it determines whether download figures mean anything. A download is counted only when a file is genuinely downloaded. Viewing or previewing an asset does not count, including opening a PDF, 3D or 360 asset inside a portal. Download numbers therefore measure people taking files away to use them, not people glancing at a thumbnail — which is the figure you want when judging whether an asset earns its place.
Entries in the report are clickable, so an interesting line takes you to the asset it refers to rather than to a search box.
Internal usage is one half of the picture. When assets are shared through a portal, the platform records what recipients did with them: visits to the portal, which assets were viewed, which were downloaded, and when a portal was forwarded on.
That last signal is the one sales teams tend to care about. A portal reaching someone it was never sent to means the material travelled inside the customer's organisation, which is a fact worth knowing before the next conversation. Silence is informative too: a proposal nobody opened is a different situation from one opened repeatedly.
The processing queue shows the status of assets moving through upload processing, including thumbnail generation, with the file's name, type, extension and dates.
Its real function is catching failure. A file that fails to process would otherwise sit in the library looking broken, with nobody responsible for noticing — a large video that never generated a preview, or a format that could not be read. The queue surfaces these so they can be reprocessed rather than failing silently, and reprocessing, editing and deleting are all available directly from it.
Every library accumulates duplicates. The same photograph is uploaded by two people, an image is re-exported at a slightly different size, a set is restored from a backup into a new folder. The duplicate report groups these into sets and reports how much storage could be recovered.
It works in two modes. File duplicates are exact matches — the identical file uploaded more than once. Visual duplicates are assets that look alike even when the underlying files differ, which is how re-exports, resizes and near-identical frames get caught. A sensitivity control sets how alike assets must be before they are grouped, from identical images only through to visually similar ones.
Each set shows the assets it contains with their folder locations, dimensions and sizes, and marks which asset carries the most metadata. That marker matters: when the same image exists three times, the copy somebody described properly is the one to keep, and it is not necessarily the oldest or the largest. You then mark each asset to keep, delete or ignore, and apply the decisions for the set.
Reports answer questions you have thought to ask. Dashboards put a smaller number of things in front of people who were not looking for them, which is how recent activity and current status get noticed at all. The home dashboard provides an overview on arrival, and custom dashboards can be built and arranged around what a particular team needs to see.
Reporting is only useful when it changes a decision. A few that repay the effort:
Reports are available to administrators by default and can be extended to other users through permission configuration. They sit under App Setup > Reports.
Some access is worth granting beyond the admin group. The people who commission photography benefit from knowing what gets used, and sales teams benefit from portal engagement, but neither group needs full administrative rights to see it.