Anyone know anything about digital asset management?

I work for a company with an unsophisticated approach to digital asset management: there's no single repository for photos and graphics, photos aren't keyworded (not that it matters - we can't search for anything), copyright tracking is nonexistent, etc. Meanwhile, I'm pretty interested in photography, take pictures for the company from time to time, and am looking to make work for myself by offering to wrangle everything.

Can the digitial assets for an organization with ~400 staff and ~25 offices across the country be managed with Adobe Bridge? I just noticed that it's free. Very rough guess is that we've got 10K images to keep track of, probably another 2K graphics. Ultimately, perhaps 50 staff in the firm would ever need to use Bridge.

Any resources you can point me to on best practices on how to do all of this? Advice?

Following along here, because we may have a need for something similar?

How does the rest of the company use the assets?  What exactly do you mean by asset management?

In reply to procainestart :

So the term, and classification of software that you're looking for, is known as Enterprise Content Management or ECM.

Basically the idea is that images, video clips, various documents, audio clips, etc. cannot be easily structured or indexed for reporting and retrieval as they are generated or saved to storage. At least not in the same manner as you would do so within an ERP system. Colloquially this is what's often called "Big Data."

The result of the inability to quickly interlink the volume of "big data" being generated, is that you lose control of it pretty easily, as sorting standards on a server are usually only loosely followed, and it's really hard to search for something with only a mental image. Which is where software comes to the rescue. ECM products provide users with a means to categorize and tag the "big data" as it is entered into the system. That allows it to be sorted, related, and indexed for later retrieval. Typically this is done by adding additional metadata to the "big data" as it is logged through the system into its place in storage. Most ECM systems will also usually have some feature which helps prevent duplication of the "big data" within the storage array.

Laserfiche is the big name in the commercial arena. Palantir is the big name in government systems. IBM also plays in this space along with a number of smaller players. Some ERP systems also have content management built into them, but they're typically built to serve a different purpose than the afore mentioned systems.

There's actually an industry group, similar to PMI and APICS, known as AIIM which collects and promotes best practices within these systems. That's a pretty good place to start your research. They used to have a members and vendors list on the as well if you want to look into a few of them. If not Capterra and the like can help you out.

I'd be interested to know what you land on.

Gartner probably has a Magic Quadrant (a piece of research that compares vendors) for the ECM market. Your organization size may be on the smaller side for the vendors listed, but it's worth a look.

Perhaps an archival system is what you're looking for?

https://www.artefactual.com/software/

My next door neighbor started this company, he's a good guy.

In a past career with programming video games we used "revision control software" to manage all the in-game assets as well as the code, but I don't think that's what you're looking for.  RCS doesn't have tagging and searching in the way that an archival system does.

1. Why isn't there a standard naming convention for your photos/graphics?

That's elementary stuff right there. And will give someone something to do for a month anyway.

2. Why can't you search the files? 

Even if they are just in a folder on a server they should be able to be searched. And develop a standard for the folder structure as well.

Photos > June Advertising > Banner Images > Summer Sale

Do you need revision control and the ability to lock the files from being overwritten with something like Perforce?

z31maniac said:

1. Why isn't there a standard naming convention for your photos/graphics?\

You still need metadata.

Lets say you want to search through all photos of "Banners".  Or "Sale Banners", or etc.  For example, in my company sometimes I am searching by product, sometimes by feature, sometimes by customer.

In reply to z31maniac :

There's a lot of other stuff that goes into it.

Lets say you create an asset. Say a stock photo of a girl in a meadow for the "Jones Project"

You need to classify the asset for later reuse. How do you do that?

Yea, you could slam it into the "Jones Project" folder on the server, then name it "Girl_in_Meadow.jpg" but what about some of the other criteria you might want to sort on for later use?

For example:

1. Copyright:
   1. Free for commercial use
   2. Free for private use
   3. Commercial use with attribution
   4. No commercial use
2. Weather
   1. Sunny
   2. Party Cloudy
   3. Night
   4. Rainy
3. Expression
   1. Happy
   2. Sad
   3. Crying
   4. Thoughtful
4. Activity
   1. Running
   2. Reading
   3. Melting ants
   4. Picnic

The list goes on. It's also useful for knowing where assets were used and reused. That way you don't duplicate the same asset in multiple folders then force your server to run a full search query each time that you want to find an asset.

With the ECM software I could run a query of "Free for commercial use, Girl, Meadow, Night, Picnic" and probably get what I wanted for the purpose I wanted.

This kind of asset management is quite a bit more ambiguous because none of the metadata is generated as the asset is generated. The human instinctively knows what the asset is, but retrieving it is difficult if you know it existed 4 to 8 months ago but can't remember the project name. Or you search for "Field" instead of "Meadow" as the image name.

It's a really difficult thing to manage though. ECM software makes this a bit easier but it really takes some effort, and a standardized, enforceable set of practices, to get right. Hell, sometimes it's really difficult like when I was running the maintenance for the Afghan theater, I couldn't even get my mechanics to name the maintenance files as (airplane)_(YYYYMMDD)_(Maint Activity).xls so I could sort the damn things easily. God help me if there were photos of a failure appended to the file.

You and I are kinda spoiled by ERP systems which relate customers to orders, orders to invoices, invoices to payments, payments to GL transactions, and then can then be used do things like relate individual GL transactions back to individual customer orders. That way I can run a report or open a screen to show all GL transactions generated by a specific customer on a specific day and find out why there's a 4 cent variance in the AR.

ProDarwin said:

z31maniac said:

1. Why isn't there a standard naming convention for your photos/graphics?\

You still need metadata.

Lets say you want to search through all photos of "Banners".  Or "Sale Banners", or etc.  For example, in my company sometimes I am searching by product, sometimes by feature, sometimes by customer.

True, I just found it interesting that a company would have that many files but no consistent naming nomenclature to find them.

The0retical (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to z31maniac :

There's a lot of other stuff that goes into it.

Lets say you create an asset. Say a stock photo of a girl in a meadow for the "Jones Project"

You need to classify the asset for later reuse. How do you do that?

Yea, you could slam it into the "Jones Project" folder on the server, then name it "Girl_in_Meadow.jpg" but what about some of the other criteria you might want to sort on for later use?

For example:

1. Copyright:
   1. Free for commercial use
   2. Free for private use
   3. Commercial use with attribution
   4. No commercial use
2. Weather
   1. Sunny
   2. Party Cloudy
   3. Night
   4. Rainy
3. Expression
   1. Happy
   2. Sad
   3. Crying
   4. Thoughtful
4. Activity
   1. Running
   2. Reading
   3. Melting ants
   4. Picnic

The list goes on. It's also useful for knowing where assets were used and reused. That way you don't duplicate the same asset in multiple folders then force your server to run a full search query each time that you want to find an asset.

With the ECM software I could run a query of "Free for commercial use, Girl, Meadow, Night, Picnic" and probably get what I wanted for the purpose I wanted.

It's a really difficult thing to manage though. ECM software makes this a bit easier but it really takes some effort, and a standardized, enforceable set of practices, to get right. But then you have the other side where, when I was running the maintenance for the Afghan theater, I couldn't even get my mechanics to name the maintenance files as (airplane)_(YYYYMMDD)_(Maint Activity).xls so I could sort the damn things easily.

You and I are kinda spoiled by ERP systems which relate customers to orders, orders to invoices, invoices to payments, payments to GL transactions, and then can then be used do things like relate individual GL transactions back to individual customer orders. That way I can run a report or open a screen to show all GL transactions generated by a specific customer on a specific day and find out why there's a 4 cent variance in the AR.

This kind of asset management is quite a bit more ambiguous because none of the metadata is generated as the asset is generated. The human instinctively knows what the asset is, but retrieving it is difficult if you know it existed 4 to 8 months ago but can't remember the project name. Or you search for "Field" instead of "Meadow" as the image name.

Yeah. But much of your negatives are based around people not following the prescribed procedure. Even the field meadow, is something that can be standardized.

But the main thing is, if employees don't follow the protocol, it doesn't matter what system or software you use. 

In reply to z31maniac :

It can be, but around here I can barely get people to agree if a small moving body of water is a stream, a creek, or a crick. (You'll get cut around here fighting over the Sandwich, Submarine, Hoagie language.)

Language is pretty weird like that.

Some of the better pieces of ECM software now automatically append synonyms to the metadata. That makes things easier. I haven't seen one that does image recognition yet, probably because it's unreliable at best currently.

The whole area is pretty new so things are a bit slippery at the moment as you're trying to categorize something most people process instinctively with enough granularity for someone different to retrieve, who likely would processes and describe the same data differently.

z31maniac said:

But the main thing is, if employees don't follow the protocol, it doesn't matter what system or software you use. 

Its pretty much impossible to get all employees to follow such a protocol without system to enforce it.

But still even with a perfectly followed protocol, the system allows you to store (and sort by) much more data.

In the engineering world, PLM systems were created long ago for this.  You could still use modern software without one if everything were named properly, but there is a 0% chance of that ever happening.

I just keep my zeroes and ones with all my other numbers.  Works for me.

In reply to The0retical (Forum Supporter) :

Thanks for your initial and subsequent replies -- very helpful.

In the near term, I'm not going to be able to convince my firm to buy into the kind of software you describe, though it sounds like we could really use it, not only for photos/graphics, but, presumably, written content, too. I work for a consulting engineering firm, and just being able to crawl the countless thousands of written deliverables would be super useful. But that's all for another day.

Meanwhile, your sample "Jones Project" nicely underscores the problem: we have to be able to quickly find photos and graphics that cannot be searched for by file name; they need detailed metadata appended to them to simplify that process, and often that metadata describes abstract concepts. File naming conventions ultimately aren't really relevant, but having decent metadata and an organized repository for our assets are (someday, the repository might be less important, given software to look for assets across our organization).

I need to be able to search for a photo that, say, depicts nearshore and upland riverine habitat restoration, West Coast, port client, post-construction. Currently, the best way to do that is call several people and ask them where to look...

FWIW, you can use a sharepoint doc library/photo library to accomplish this, but its not ideal.

In reply to ProDarwin :

SP was suggested at one point, but folks aren't keen to go that route.