Guides
Digital asset management, explained in plain language: what a DAM is, what it costs, and how to organize, tag, and distribute your media well. The guides read in order, and each one stands on its own.
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What is Digital Asset Management?
What a DAM is, how it works, and when your team needs one — a plain-language guide to digital asset management, from ingestion to distribution.
8 min readRead the guide
How much does digital asset management cost?
What digital asset management really costs: pricing models, hidden fees, cloud versus self-hosted total cost of ownership, and how to budget by team size.
9 min read
DAM requirements checklist
A copy-pasteable DAM requirements checklist covering ingestion, metadata and search, rights, sharing, integrations, deployment, and adoption. No email gate.
6 min read
DAM RFP template
A free, copy-ready DAM RFP template: project background prompts, functional requirements tables, security questions, a scoring method, and a timeline.
6 min read
How to implement a DAM
How to implement a DAM in phases: inventory, a small metadata model, a pilot team, migration in slices, training, and the metrics that prove it works.
8 min read
DAM metadata best practices
How to design DAM metadata people actually fill in: field types, a minimal schema, AI-assisted tagging, embedded IPTC/XMP, and the failure modes to avoid.
8 min read
How to build a DAM taxonomy
A practical guide to DAM taxonomies: controlled vocabularies, hierarchy vs flat lists, facets, governance, and a worked example for a consumer brand.
8 min read
What is a brand portal?
What a brand portal is, what belongs in one, how guest access works, and how to keep it current automatically — a practical guide for brand teams.
7 min read
Self-hosted DAM: what it takes and when it's right
Why organizations self-host a DAM, what running one actually involves — infrastructure, backups, updates — and an honest look at the tradeoffs.
9 min read
AI in digital asset management
What AI genuinely does well in a DAM — tagging, transcription, semantic search, face recognition — what still needs humans, and how to adopt it sanely.
8 min read
C2PA Content Credentials in a DAM: what gets verified, what it proves, and how freedam handles it
A sourced explanation of C2PA Content Credentials: what a manifest contains, what a verifier checks, which cameras and AI tools sign today, the limits of the standard, and exactly what freedam does with credentials on upload.
12 min read
DAM vs SharePoint, in four parts
What SharePoint can do with media, what each option costs, how a DAM and Microsoft 365 share the work, and how a migration runs. Every limit and price links to its Microsoft source.
4 parts, about 48 minutes in total.
Part 1
SharePoint as a DAM: the real limits, from Microsoft's own documentation
What SharePoint can and cannot do with images, video and design files, with every limit taken from Microsoft documentation rather than from a vendor opinion.
13 min read
Part 2
SharePoint vs DAM: what each one actually costs
A worked cost model for SharePoint as a media library versus a DAM: Microsoft 365 licences, extra storage, pay-as-you-go AI, build hours, and search time.
11 min read
Part 3
DAM and SharePoint together: how to split the work
A reference architecture for running a DAM next to Microsoft 365: what stays in SharePoint, what moves, how Teams, OneDrive, Copilot and Office reach the assets.
12 min read
Part 4
Migrating from SharePoint to a DAM: a step-by-step playbook
How to move a media library out of SharePoint in slices: inventory, dedupe, column mapping, permission translation, link redirects, and a timeline by volume.
12 min read
DAM vs cloud storage, in four parts
What Google Drive and Dropbox document about their own limits, why file search cannot find an image, what a shared link does not record, and how to move a media library off a shared drive. Every limit links to the source it came from.
4 parts, about 45 minutes in total.
Part 1
Google Drive and Dropbox as a DAM: the limits, from their own documentation
What Google Drive and Dropbox publish about capacity, versioning, sync and API limits, what each figure means for a media library, and its vendor source.
12 min read
Part 2
Why you cannot find the image: what file search indexes, and what it does not
Google Drive reads nineteen camera settings out of a photo and not one word of its caption. What file search indexes, and the four indexes a media library needs.
11 min read
Part 3
Shared links, rights and the audit trail: what a drive does not record
Google Drive and Dropbox control who can open a file, not whether you may publish it. Access control versus rights management, and what an audit trail must record.
10 min read
Part 4
Moving off the shared drive: folders to metadata, without breaking links
A playbook for moving a media library off Google Drive or Dropbox: the folder tree as metadata, the IPTC already in the files, the 750 GB cap, and broken links.
12 min read