ANy recommended DAM software for news-oriented web site?

[aengblom]

Greetings all,

I was wondering if you might have some recommendations regarding the potential implementation of DAM software at my company. Currently we run a (pay-for) news site with very very few images, but we're looking to begin adding photographs and other images at an increasing rate. Because of the scope of our coverage (and partially our "art" budget) a lot of the images we will be using will be re-used.

As a result, we need some sort of library so we can keep track of these images. This library would need to be accessible across the newsroom (since we don't have a dedicated photo desk... and our workflow discourages such a roll) and ideally would be able to communicate with our proprietary content management system. I.E. It would be great to either able to press a button in the DAM and say "send to publishing system" or (alternatively) press a button in our CMS and say "pull from DAM"

So far, I've identified Fotoware and ImageFolio as possibilities, but I'm still trying to figure out what exactly they offer and have very little idea of their cost/our budget. (Please be kind, I got assigned to look into this first since I was a photo editor in the 90s and have the most experience in photos ;-) )

Anyway, I'd appreciate any recommendations as to whether there are other products/services to look at (or if I should strike off the two mentioned above).

Thanks!

[rogerhoward]

Depending on your CMS, you may well find it can handle lightweight DAM needs as well - either through a specialized module, or by handling image content using built-in tools. Many Web CMS' make capable, if imperfect, DAMs.

Without knowing more about your CMS and workflow, it'd be hard to recommend a product from here - any external option you pick will require integration work, and it may be that what you gain may be offset by the costs vs. using tools already in the CMS.

Also, it depends on how far you intend to take the DAM - is it *only* for linking assets into articles published in your CMS, or do you want to rethink your photo workflow in its entirety?

[aengblom]

Thanks Roger,

What I'm really looking for are potential vendors / products that we should consider to be compared to something we'd develop internally. I'm not expecting any specific recommendation, although any generalized estimated price would be hugely appreciated. (i.e. This product costs "hundreds"/ "thousands" /" tens of thousands" of dollars).

What's happening is we're revamping our web site to allow for more images to be used (and require it in certain places). Many of the images are probably going to be acquired from press kits and other entities over time, so we're going to need some way of searching for images as the need for them arises.

This need could be met, I'm sure, by many simple applications, but we need something that can allow all our reporters and editors access from multiple locations across our network (i.e. multi-user). In addition, it would be ideal if the software could prevent reporters/editors from having to deal too much with the file system when getting a file on our site. For example, I would love to have a reporter be able to just throw "photoid:XYZABC" onto their story and have it "attached."

Obviously, we since we roll our own CMS, we could probably do this ourselves, but given a few things about how our CMS performs, the idea of managing images in it is a bit terrifying. Moreover, our internal resources are limited so buying a solution outright might very well be easier.

With regards to your specific questions: 1) since we developed our own CMS, it doesn't really have much in the way of image management tools 2) we don't need something to manage the workflow in its entirety, just the final result.

Thanks!

[rogerhoward]

Ok, sounds great. Since you have some development/technical resources, but are rightly hesitant to develop your own from scratch, I would look at Razuna and OpenEdit - both open source DAMs, both heavily customizable. Starting with a platform like that, you could spend your precious development dollars on integration/customization, rather than spending a lot of time reinventing the basic wheels of a DAM.

Open source isn't free, and neither of these products - or, frankly, most commercial "enterprise" DAMs - will get you all the way there out of the box... but if you have some technical capacity, you get a good headstart on the problem. Unless you can find that perfect, rare specimen - an out of the box product that suits your needs perfectly - an approach like this can take you far.

There are plenty of low-end commercial DAMs to look at as well - Extensis Portfolio and Canto Cumulus are quite different beasts, but reasonably priced and can both be readily integrated with other products.

[aengblom]

Thanks Roger,

While I have your attention, if I did away with the requirement to have any formal interaction with our database (beyond, user downloads image to desktop/network folder, attaches image to article using our CMS) would you have any additional recommendations?

Again,
Thanks,
Drew

[rogerhoward]

Depending on your needs, you may be able to get away with something as simple as ResourceSpace - another open source product, much simpler than OpenEdit and Razuna. Getting rid of a requirement to integrate with your CMS doesn't gain you much in options - most DAMs can be readily integrated in some fashion.

For low-cost commercial solutions, you may also look at Canto Cumulus and Extensis Portfolio - but support multiple simultaneous users, both have at least a basic Web interface. Canto runs on a proprietary database these days, though can mirror its data to a SQL database, so one-way integrating is still possible without having to deal with the Cumulus Java APIs.

[johnbeardy]

It's worth adding that Extensis has pretty good scripting scripting hooks, so you can build custom apps on it, and can run on SQL Server and IIRC Oracle. You've also got Version Cue integration.

John

[rogerhoward]

I've said before, I'm hesitant to say anything negative about products in public forums. However, having spent plenty of time scripting Portfolio lately, and since many of the issues are already documented publicly on PortfolioFAQ.com, I wouldn't say it's got pretty good scripting by any stretch. Then again, Cumulus has no platform-native scripting, but is significantly customizable via the Java APIs - not exactly ideal for day-to-day scripting, of course. I won't say much more, other than to implore people to test their assumptions about scriptability - if that's a concern - before writing a check. I'm failure sure that last time I worked with Portfolio professionally, 6 or 7 years ago IIRC, the scripting support was far, far better.

The fact that I've got Portfolio running on MS SQL Server via SQL Connect is the only saving grace since much of what I need to do I can resort to SQL for - but in the case of end-user scripts I need my users to run on their desktops, that's not a great option.

[peterkrogh]

Drew,
As you are thinking about this, you might want to make a conceptual division between archive management, and management of the approved content. 

It's likely that the company will be in possession of material that it would not want to make available to the entire institution.  There could be issues of rights, suitability, quality, format and more that would best be served by having a real wall between the collections. Depending on your workflow, it might be better to have a large archive managed by someone who understands the issues well, and who can push a smaller set of approved images into the CMS.  At that point, maybe the CMS can do everything needed to make the photos available to any users in the group.

While a wall between systems makes two-way communication difficult or impossible, it may solve more problems than it creates. It also may enable you to do the full archive management with an off-the-shelf product for a considerably smaller investment.

If you need to build a system that can reliably manage an entire archive at the same time it's offering permission-based access to limited subsets of the collection, as well as format/color/file size conversion options, you are likely looking at an expensive system that will take a long time to implement.

Peter