Digital Asset Management solution

[Sarah McMaster]

What are people liking for a DAM solution these days? We're looking for something we can let loose for our entire internal staff and faculty population for use on their webpages and in print publication design requests etc.

Needs are:

web-based/ hosted

multiple permission levels

multiple file formats - video, images, vector

light boxes

good support and implementation help

Nice to haves are:

face tagging

social sharing integration

an editing module for some cropping etc.

works with other printing workflow solutions (xerox)

Any recommendations of good services/products to explore- and conversely, any to steer clear of in our search?

Thanks all!

[Julie Michener]

I'd also be interested in any resources/reviews other members share as we are looking for a solution for our growing (and unwieldy) photography collections.  Thanks all!

[Lillian Contreras]

We're looking at replacing our DAM server and are going to a cloud-based service.  We're looking at Widen.  The pricing seems reasonable for what you get.  We're hoping we can also store video in addition to photo, docs, etc.

[Sarah McMaster]

Interesting. Yes, I've just started investigating them. They do look good.

[Erica Sterling]

Check out http://www.webdamsolutions.com/ They have alot of the items you listed above and works exclusively with higher education.  They also have an impressive client list.

[Sarah McMaster]

awesome- thanks!

[Maziyar Shariat Panahi]

Hi,

I'd like to share my work experience with one of these DAM software.

The software is ResourceSpace. It's free and open source. If you want to read a review about RS there is a great review published in Linux Pro Magazine.

I've been using this DAM software in our project (Cultural Heritage) for 5 months and we manage and organize more than 4000 digital items including image, video, audio, and document (PDF, PowerPoint, Word, etc) with ResourceSpace.

I installed and configured ResourceSpace on one our Virtual Machines in VMware ESXi  server. But if you want to know how much resources you need, the VM specification is: Ubuntu Server 11.10 + (Apache, PHP, MySQL), 4G RAM, 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon. It's really really light-weight web-based application. The search is also unbelievable! Fast and perfect.

It worked for us and helped a lot to manage and organize our digital assets. One of the good things about ResourceSpace is automatic EXIF/IPTC/XMP header import and export. It also supports PBCore and Dublin Core metadata which is really important for us to collect Cultural Heritage digital resources.

Easy to install and config by few clicks. Just few things to do before installation which is not that hard.

The only weakness (compare to other open-source software) is the community for support. There is just ResourceSpace Google Group and it's not that bad but it would be good to have a forum.

You can also contact them to get support or other services. Montala

I hope it was helpful. :)

[Sarah McMaster]

Sure was- thanks, Maziyar!

[Cathy Behrendt]

I also started using ResourceSpace, based on a recommendation from here. There's a lot to like. I just activated the cropping tool, which took only a few minutes and turned out to be great. The thing I'm struggling most with is tagging. It's just not configurable enough--too many clicks & too much scrolling.

[Aaron Maturen]

Cathy,

We had the some problem with the excessive amount of clicks, so we developed a plugin that allows you to tag images from the search page without any page reloads. You can download it here to try it out https://github.com/aaronmaturen/rs_inline_keywords/downloads .

Our photographers rave about how much easier it is to tag resources now. If you install it, let me know how it works out for you. Feel free to contact me if you need help installing it or have any suggestions.

-Aaron

[Erik Hagen]

Is there anything to it other than uploading and activating? I'm getting an error:

hooks/search.php line 19: Undefined offset: 0

[Aaron Maturen]

This is a bug that got introduced when I added the feature to select which fields you want to be able to edit... You have to go into the options for the plugins and select which fields you want to be able to add. keep in mind, that all of them are going to display as text boxes. 

Team Center > Manage Plugins > inline_keywords ... options > 

then choose them from the select box (ctrl on windows, cmd on mac to select multiple) 

[Erik Hagen]

Awesome, working now, thanks