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Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

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Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#31

Post by pixelmonkey »

Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company.

So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library:

https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc...

Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves them from your web server using its static HTTP serving configuration (e.g. typically via Apache HTTP Server). The uploads are simple and 1:1, whatever you upload through the browser ends up on the web server as a file.

But usually, a media library could "do more" with those assets -- it could resize them, convert them to web-optimized assets (e.g. WebP), could create thumbnails and crops for different page layouts, could serve the content from a CDN. And that's just images, but there are other things you could do for PDFs (create a searchable index), MSOffice files (auto-convert to PDFs), or videos (extract thumbnails, re-encode in other resolutions, serve from video CDN or hosted video player service, like Wistia or Vimeo).

Of course, if you don't use WordPress, perhaps your CMS doesn't have a media library function at all, in which case a DAM might be even more helpful. This seems to be the case for a number of static site generators (SSGs), for example.

On a quick glance, it looks like Daminik is going after this with a separate open source project (written in PHP), and for its alpha is focusing on image management (using ImageMagick under the hood for image conversions). It also seems like it has built in support for uploading assets to Amazon S3, which would mean presumably you could very easily put the AWS CloudFront CDN on top.

(I run a personal WordPress site, and the way I personally handle this is to live with the built-in WP media library, but then put Cloudflare caching and CDN atop at the edge.)

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#32

Post by zerkten »

I'm a little confused about which DAM use cases this solves today, and which ones are next. Devs often do not understand the details or complexity of the use cases you are dealing with and can't work out how to slot this project in.

If you are looking to drive revenue eventually from this project I'd think about the compliance and asset usage angles. It may be cheap and easy to implement reporting features which will get you adoption. My experience with DAM has been that people will try to avoid integrating with a DAM, so it's hard to achieve the vision of everyone using it by opting in. If you are reporting on who's using old assets, assets are reused inappropriately, who needs to be contacted to replace something etc. it will be much easier to get adoption. Then push on the other parts of the DAM vision.

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#33

Post by pacifika »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #31

Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company. So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc... Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves…

You might be interested in Tachyon https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon-plugin, an image resizing service built to be used with Amazon S3 as the image backend, AWS Lambda (or any node.js server) to process images using sharp, and sits behind a CDN such as CloudFront or CloudFlare.

Disclaimer: my employer (but I don’t work on the project).

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#34

Post by pests »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #31

Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company. So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc... Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves…

This type of tool is definitely useful.

Once you start managing multiple properties and want to keep consistent branding across not only your website but all the social media sites and all the listing services like Yelp etc.

Constantly digging up the right asset, at the right resolution, and dealing with CompanyX-Logo-New222-Real.png like in the stone age before version management.

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#37

Post by soulclap »

pacifika wrote: post #33
pixelmonkey wrote: post #31

Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company. So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc... Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves…

You might be interested in Tachyon https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon-plugin , an image resizing service built to be used with Amazon S3 as the image backend, AWS Lambda (or any node.js server) to process images using sharp, and sits behind a CDN such as CloudFront or CloudFlare. Disclaimer: my employer (but I don’t work on the project).

Sounds interesting. Where has the main repo for Tachyon gone though? https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon says it has been disabled.

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#39

Post by pacifika »

soulclap wrote: post #37
pacifika wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in Tachyon https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon-plugin , an image resizing service built to be used with Amazon S3 as the image backend, AWS Lambda (or any node.js server) to process images using sharp, and sits behind a CDN such as CloudFront or CloudFlare. Disclaimer: my employer (but I don’t work on the project).

Sounds interesting. Where has the main repo for Tachyon gone though? https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon says it has been disabled.

That’s news to me I’ll find out next week and update.

Re: Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

#40

Post by corytheboyd »

Images are easy peasy DAM material. Unless you can handle other media types, this won’t be taken seriously, because that’s when things get hard.

Real companies aren’t struggling to manage thousands of 10KB JPEG files, they are having issues with thousands of 2GB PSD files that they want to show up on their website as images.

I work for a DAM, and have seen The Shit. “But don’t use 2GB PSD files” is NOT an acceptable answer. That is not how these teams work. They are not engineers. They are managers, designers, marketing people, etc. The entire point of a DAM is to turn garbage into gold. If you can’t accept that, you won’t succeed.

One sliver of DAM is rasterizing ALL non-raster files for thumbnail preview. Seriously, all files. Yes, people want thumbnail previews of PowerPoint files, and they better look good, too.

It gets so complex that an entire product exists for just this (amongst other things): https://www.blitline.com Yeah yeah “it’s just imagemagick as a service” but go try running that yourself, for every type of file, warts and all.

Sometimes a file won’t have an extension, or have the wrong extension entirely. Sometimes a file won’t have metadata. Sometimes the CDN you are downloading a file from will not support range requests, or return 200 but with an error in the body, instead of the file bytes. You will never have checksums given to you to validate downloaded file integrity.

It will get complicated and messy. This is ONE OF the hard problems you are solving so that others don’t have to— your value proposition.

Anyway, good luck!

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