Using Subversion for graphic design files and other binary assets

a photoshop plugin is genius. the graphic designer on our team was able to use an eclipse plugin to update/commit. we've switched to git which doesn't have any nice gui's (smart git is best so far...thinking of buying it) so i do all his pulls/pushes.

I've worked with a large team of artists and we had an art repository of around 125GB and maybe 10000 changes. Subversion worked really well. We used the tortoise interface and after a few weeks everyone got used to it.

Adding plugins for specific apps is a good idea. I had previously used Alienbrain and the only real difference was the plugins (AB had plugins for MS Office, 3DSMax, Dev Studio and Maya) and an interesting bucket backup system where you could back up legacy checkings making the database smaller and significantly faster. At the time we had a database of about 1TB and most of it was in bucket backups.

Another interesting feature was the workflow where an artist would checkin an item but it wouldn't go into the main development branch until a senior artist has checked the work. This was a nice idea but proved to be too time expensive for our senior artists who of course were not paid to be gatekeepers and were the best artist we had so management preferred them to actually make things!

The least interesting thing was the price per seat which was around £1000 per year and a support contract which grew depending on the size of your team (this was about 8 years ago so I may be off on the prices then and now).

Although Alienbrain was cool my personal feeling was that the money was better spent on a little bit of training and a subversion system. As long as your team is smaller then say 50 artists and developers.

Also on HN:

"Git: A Designer's Perpective": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774983

It has always seemed to me that a traditional CMS was a better path for creative archiving than a version control system, but that may just be me. A CMS can do things like allow you to manage a PS document while publishing it's flatter JPEG to your web site or a print image in a Quark layout. I guess if you just want to back up different version than a version control system would do just fine and is simple but a CMS can save so much time and there are plenty of good ones that are free.

I would guess the hardest part is teaching non-technical types the concepts of version control, especially one like subversion.

Were there any tricks in doing that kind of teaching?