Why webshop images belong in a dedicated image bank

Does your company run a larger webshop with a lot of images, and perhaps video as well? Then it is worth considering moving the hosting of those media files to an image bank.

In this guide we look at why that can be a very good idea.

Traditional image storage is awkward and expensive

Most webshops today keep their images directly on the server that hosts the shop itself. That is impractical on several fronts.

First, product images tend to take up a great deal of space, and you can quickly exhaust the capacity of the server or the hosting package you are renting. Upgrading for more space is expensive, and moving to a larger dedicated server is a cumbersome process in its own right.

Keeping the images in an image bank instead is easy to scale and far cheaper than paying for extra space on a server that was never built for images, but for running a website – on fast, small and expensive NVMe SSD storage.

With the images in an image bank, running the shop and hosting the images are also separated. If the server hosting the webshop goes down, the images are still reachable for use on social media or for the press. On top of that, the webshop server can be tuned for web traffic while the images are handled somewhere better suited to them.

Traditional image hosting can also be remarkably inflexible. Take a product image used in several places in several different formats and sizes, which now has to be replaced. A design team would first have to find and adapt every version, after which a web team would have to upload and swap the images everywhere they appear in the shop. With an intelligent image bank that work becomes far easier, because everyone can work together in one place and push the images directly to where they are used.

An image bank is more than somewhere to put images

If you choose to use an image bank, you will typically find that you get a great deal more than storage.

The image bank from Kontainer gives you, among other things:

• An online image editing tool that makes it easy to adapt images for the web, social media and email marketing
• Integration with tools such as the Adobe applications, making it easy to sync new images into the database
• Smart organisation, so it stays clear where your images and videos actually are
• Rights management, so access to images can be controlled and granted to the right people
• Tagging, so you can build tag clouds that make it easy to find similar images within the same tag
• The option to build landing pages and press kits outside the webshop

So when a webshop decides to use an image bank, it should not be seen only as somewhere images are kept, but as a tool that makes both image editing and image storage more efficient and more considered.

If you are considering an image bank from Kontainer, you always get a thorough introduction to the system and everything it can do, so your webshop benefits from it from day one.