Most Dash customers have a large number of files on local or network drives that they want to import into their Dash account, either as a one-off when getting set up, or on an ongoing basis. We call this a bulk import, and this article describes how to get these assets into Dash.

The first question to ask is whether to upload the assets via your browser, or use the bulk import options listed in this article.

Browsers are great at uploading your day to day assets - photoshoots, product shots, campaign videos etc. All the things you use Dash for on a daily basis can easily be uploaded via the browser, using our standard upload function.

However, browsers are subject to internet dropouts and can often struggle with uploading very large volumes of assets. In these situations, we recommend doing a bulk import.

The larger your upload, the longer it will take, and therefore the higher the chance your internet might drop out briefly and the browser loses the connection. The time taken to complete an upload depends on your internet speed, so what might take 10 minutes for one user might take 30 for another.

As a rule of thumb, we'd recommend avoiding uploading more than 5GB of assets in any single upload batch. If you are trying to upload this volume of assets, we'd recommend either:

If you already use Google Drive or Dropbox, you can easily import your assets from these tools straight into Dash. This happens behind the scenes and isn't dependant on your browser.

💡 Our Google Drive integration lets you import folders and files directly from your Google Drive account. You can use their desktop app to transfer local files to Google Drive and then import straight into Dash.

💡 Our Dropbox integration lets you import folders and files directly from your Dropbox account. You can use their desktop app to transfer local files to Dropbox and then import straight to your Dash!

If your assets are in a cloud service such as One Drive, read this article to learn how to import these assets straight into Dash.

If you don’t have access to a cloud storage account, the steps below explain how to upload your local or network files to a cloud storage location (an Amazon S3 bucket) and then import them from there into Dash.

ℹ️ This is a slightly technical process. You may prefer to utilise Google Drive's desktop uploader (see above) as a temporary means of importing.

Dash's 'import from S3' feature will automatically create folders within Dash to match the directory structure containing the imported files. You can easily re-organise assets once they are in Dash, but if you want to create a specific folder structure during the import, now's a good time to get your assets arranged.

💡 Now is a great time to prepare a metadata file if you also want to import metadata to these assets once they are in Dash.

Follow these steps to create a 'bucket' in Amazon S3 (Amazon's business cloud storage solution that Dash uses). Alternatively, if you have your own bucket you can use that.

If you don't have an Amazon Web Services account, we can create a bucket for you - just get in touch and we'll be happy to help.

Once your bucket is created, you will need to know the Access Key ID, Secret Access Key and bucket name.

Follow these steps to upload files into your s3 bucket from your desktop computer.

💡 We recommend you create a top-level folder in the upload client called "Import", and drag all files under that folder, as this keeps the imported files in one place in Dash, which you can then organise at your leisure.

Now you have imported your files, you might want to update their metadata in bulk as well. See this article to learn how to do a metadata import.

We don't import the following files:

Many S3 clients include folders as individual objects that contribute to the total 'objects' being imported. However, folders aren't actually imported as distinct objects - a folder is just metadata in Dash and S3. So, we show the folder skipped so that you can see the count of actual files that have been imported.