Why Shade is better suited for your growing asset base and creative files.
Key takeaways
Shade is built for any type of asset.
Shade is able to AI search 500+ different file and media types, including BRAW, R3D, Audio, 3D objects, and more. Shade is able to give creatives the freedom to use a multitude of assets and go beyond the traditional file type and storage methods posed by Google Drive.
Real-time access & sharing.
Shade offers a full web and desktop platform that allows you to easily and quickly search and share your files from anywhere. Through ShadeFS you can virtually mount Shade drives as if they were an SSD on your computer. Google Drive has limited sharing options and is not the best option for creatives.
The advantage of hybrid cloud.
With Shade, you are able to leverage a combination of on-premise and cloud solutions from your NAS or long-term storage to syncing with other preconfigured server infrastructure. It brings together your assets across all cloud storage providers into one platform to access, search, and share. Google Drive is only built as a cloud-based solution.
Ready to switch from Google Drive to Shade?
Shade can index 500+ file types.
As a creative or team of creatives, you don’t want to be limited by the types of files your storage provider offers. Google drive has historically been designed around documents and spreadsheets with very limited bandwidth and transfer capabilities. This makes it hard to use for most creative projects.
Furthermore, accessing these files can become a hassle and result in you using many third-party services for different file types. Google Drive was built for the individual to store the most common file types and data. In the post-production industry, for example, there are so many file types that are so large in size which call for another innovative and easy-to-use platform.
Shade offers a hyper-personalized solution that allows you to access hundreds of file types like R3D Video, RAW Images, and various 3D assets. Google Drive lacks the ability to comprehend and download these complex file types, leading to greater download times and creating more inefficiencies for you. Every creative team wants their assets to be accessible and instantly available, so they can do their job without worrying about the issues preventing them from creating.
Shade can find and preview your assets.
Even though Google Drive allows you to organize assets in folders, it is not an effective solution for searching and previewing multimodal assets. Why? When different types of files are mixed with each other, visual assets can easily get lost and become impossible to find. Even with shared folders, your team has a difficult time finding files on their own unless you send them a direct link. If you’re a videographer, editor, designer, or any other type of creative, being able to instantly preview your assets is a superpower. Google Drive lacks this functionality and is slowing down your workflow.
Shade’s multimodal AI neural search goes beyond the traditional “tagging” and allows you to find any asset you need. Search for “three people swimming” or “bamboo forest” and you shall receive. Shade gives your time back and handles all the indexing so you truly never lose an asset again.
Own your data with hybrid cloud.
The cloud has provided innovative ways to store data, but it also has given rise to new challenges, like out-of-control costs which has deepened complexity and restricted vendor lock-in. The sheer quantity of workloads run in the cloud has caused cloud expenses to skyrocket. Google Drive was popularized for its cloud-based approach, but as a creative team you want access to your files anytime and anywhere just as if you were working in the same room.
You should not have to wait to download 50TB of data after a shoot or days of work. Instead, you should be pulling that from any hardware you run Shade with like another hard drive or NAS solution. Shade allows you to pull in your data across your different data locations that you may use to streamline your workflow and create a seamless method of sharing and storing data. No more data siloes. This rids the need to constantly download data repeatedly and wait long periods of time to just start working on your assets. Using Shade grants access to all your data sources and unifies them in one location as if you’re working on your own intelligent NAS.
When to use Google Drive over Shade: Documents & Small Files
Google Drive is a cloud-based solution that allows anyone to quickly access different file types and store data on one unified platform. It is great tool for your workflow if you are dealing with basic files like documents, and spreadsheets and not downloading/exporting terabytes of video, raw or 3D files. If you are working with a small number of assets, Google Drive will fit your needs but once you need to sift through terabytes of assets, it can lead to large file upload issues, limits on file size and total storage space, and difficulty with finding your asssets. Here at Shade, we offer a one-stop shop for creatives to easily access and share all types of assets. There’s no more need to use a software for sharing, a software for cloud, a software for on prem permissions. Everything can be done in Shade.
