Whether you’re a digital signage network operator or a venue owner, it’s important to understand the best practices for your digital signage solutions’ creative library.

Understanding things like file size and type, along with playback and how best to organise folders and move creatives is of vital importance for all digital signage software users.

What To Know About Digital Signage File Size

Regardless of your digital signage software choice, you’ll have a CMS where you upload and manage your creatives, this is known as a creative library.

Files you upload to this creative library need to be the optimal size, taking into account the specifications of the content and other key individual factors.

The reasons for this include avoiding over bloating your library, which leads to slowdowns/lag, and to maximise the download speed of your media players.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all solution, every creative is going to have a different file size, but this can be controlled to some extent.

One of the best ways to ensure that your digital signage content files remain an appropriate size is to keep image resolution to a minimum.

This is of course subjective to the actual size of your digital billboards. Due to the large size of these screens, their resolution is often lower than standard monitors/TVs and they rarely have a dpi higher than 72.

There is no reason for digital signage content to be 4K or even 1080p when the screen is only 400x800 due to viewers being, in general, far away. This makes the content look and feel high quality, even if it technically isn’t.

Do's & Don'ts of Digital Signage File Types

Aside from things like relying on static content and choosing the right media player, it’s important to understand content file types and which ones you can and can’t use.

This may be a bit more digital signage software specific as each platform will support different file types.

We at Doohly support all image and video formats, provided they are not operating system codec specific (such as .mov) along with HTML packages.

By ensuring support for as many different file types as possible, users are given more freedom over the digital signage content they wish to display.

For image uploads on Doohly, we recommend making use of JPEG and PNG files. Both of these formats provide high-quality creatives for the purpose of outdoor digital signage.

JPEG is best used when there isn’t much text (such as pricing) involved in the creative. PNG on the other hand should be used when creating text-heavy content. This is due to PNGs being a lossless image format.

Most photo editing/graphic design software solutions support both of these formats. Both JPEG and PNG (along with others) can be created in Canva, meaning you can simply create and start displaying without leaving Doohly.

For video uploads, we strongly recommend using MP4 files, they’re high quality and are usually a smaller size.

Doohly’s digital signage player also supports HTML packages, meaning you can pull in data from external sources such as weather, news updates, and social media feeds.

Setting up HTML packages can require higher levels of technical knowledge, but we have a guide outlining the requirements in our knowledge base.

What is Playback Scaling?

Playback scaling is an important part of creative library management and practices, and while it may seem daunting at first the concept is easy to understand and implement.

First, playback scaling can be defined as the way that scheduled content is displayed on your cloud-based media players when the screen size doesn’t match the creative's resolution.

Different signage solutions have different supported scaling methods, Doohly for example makes use of three: scale to fit, scale to fill, and stretch to fill.

• Scale to Fit: Keep the creatives aspect ratio and resize it to fit the frame

• Stretch to Fill: Ignore the creatives aspect ratio and stretch it to fill the entire frame

• Scale to Fill: Keep the aspect ratio of the creative and resize to fill the frame, overflow will be cropped and not displayed

When you upload creatives, it’s best practice to ensure that the desired playback method is selected. Using Doohly is as simple as double-clicking and selecting the correct option from the drop-down.

Digital Signage CMS Folder Management Tips

When it comes to folder and file management, the best practice is simply to do what is most efficient for you and your team.

There are some general guidelines that are worth following to help ensure things are easy to find, especially when multiple people are accessing the creative library.

It’s best to ensure that everyone who is uploading and managing creatives agrees to a specific file and folder organisation method.

This can be done in a multitude of ways, common methods include creating individual folders for each campaign, individual advertisers, or even date ranges.

Another common way to keep the creative library organised is to create folders for content that is no longer relevant, but you want to have on hand.

How you create and organise your library is ultimately up to you and your team, but remember, everyone who is involved should be on the same page.

Creating effective outdoor digital signage is important, as is keeping it all organised and easy to access.

Doohly makes managing not only your digital signage but also your creative library incredibly easy and doable from any device.

Make use of Doohly as your end-to-end digital signage software solution by getting in touch with us today!