The proliferation of digital data stored on a company's corporate network often makes it difficult to find the data you need. According to experts, the average user spends a tenth of their working time working with files. However, the capabilities of general-purpose relational databases are limited. The user often needs to do more than just save, find, or retrieve the information they need. In addition, you need to save metadata for images, audio and video files, track their versions and access rights to them, convert them into various formats. Digital asset management (DAM) systems are designed to perform all these operations.
How does DAM differ from other tools?
An important feature of DAM systems is the creation of small copies of heavyweight files during import into the system (so-called proxy files). This allows you to view the material found in the archive without having to work with the heavy source file. The creation of proxy files when storing digital assets is especially important for modern video formats shot with 4K or 8K resolution. One minute of such a video will take about 350 megabytes on disk, and to preview it, placed even on a corporate server, you will have to use a gigabit channel. Image preview will become an indisputable advantage when working with photos.
A distinctive feature of DAM systems is the management of metadata, which is information about an asset, copyright holder, licenses, etc. Professional use of media is impossible without this information. Metadata allows you to search and use media files. An image without metadata cannot be found among many others.
The global community has developed data standards that “accompany” images. These standards are supported by manufacturers of electronics (cameras, telephones, camcorders, etc.) and software products for processing visual content.
When working with metadata, DAM systems are becoming an indispensable tool, because know how to read and understand information from these fields, allow you to search through metadata fields and, most importantly, edit and enrich them. Artificial intelligence technologies can enrich metadata. DAM systems already use technologies for recognizing faces, text on images, license plates, diseases, car models and much more. Recognizing logos in an image is a particularly interesting feature in terms of brand consistency.
DAM systems allow you to create a single repository with the current brand identity, which can be integrated with other systems using the API. It can be any CMS, social networks, instant messengers and any other IT components.
DAMs are often not completely stand-alone systems and their use involves embedding content in third-party sites. External users may not be aware of the use of DAM, but see the resources already built into the site.
DAM can be either universal, prepared for a large amount of different types of content, or specialized.
Specialized systems can have extended functionality. For example, DAM for photographers can have the function of dynamically forming a ZIP archive from photos or the ability to crop photos from the web interface, change EXIF data, apply a watermark, dynamically resize to the resolution requested by the user, etc.
DAMs with video upload support can have a means of transcoding video files into web-usable formats or a browser-based video editor.
