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Digital asset management

Sorted Collections

Article from ADMIN 24/2014

By Mela Eckenfels

If you want to make your photos, videos, audio files, and text documents available to others, your best bet is to manage this multimedia content with special software. Four programs can help you create, publish, and share these digital assets.

Most users can find their way around data collections with no problem. They arrange their photos, videos, audio files, and documents in a directory structure that they can still understand later. However, as soon as a team requires access to multiple digital assets, a system is needed that everyone can cope with. Tags, preview, search, and filter functions help with orientation.

Digital asset management (DAM) systems store and publish media content, allow data and metadata to be processed, secure resources with ACLs, offer version control in some cases, convert files into other formats, and link them with other content.

DAM software is available for different target groups. The market is bustling with smaller systems aimed at marketing and creative departments, programs for huge collections such as those in museums, libraries, and archives, and complex B2B systems that control the workflow between suppliers and companies.

We tested four smaller solutions: two for your own LAMP server and two cloud services. In the latter case, the test team chose providers with a fixed price model. Phraseanet [1] and ResourceSpace [2] are open source, and they take on the two commercial candidates Razuna [3] and Smartimage [4].

We investigated which file types the programs import and export, the comfort of handling metadata, and whether they offer a mass tagging function and version control. We also tested the search and filter functions and the user and group management.

Phraseanet and ResourceSpace proved themselves on an Amazon EC2 micro instance on Ubuntu Server 14.04 (64 bit) with Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Approximately 5,000 photos in JPEG, PNG, and Nikon RAW (NEF codec) formats and a few documents (PDF, LibreOffice Writer, and MS

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