Every company that builds and maintains a digital asset catalog fights the same demons. Marketing departments waste countless hours searching through folders of nearly identical files, designers or architects accidentally work on outdated versions, and brand managers have to deal with wrong assets turning up on ads and web pages.
Let’s talk about version control in DAM: why “tried-and-true” solutions like network folders inevitably lose, how version control actually works in DAM, and when on-premise DAM systems are preferable to cloud DAMs.
When you store digital assets on a file server or network-attached storage (NAS), you have to get everyone in your team to adhere to the same principles: how you name the files, increment the version number, etc. That seems straightforward enough, so why does it fail?
The main reason is that simple solutions encourage everyone to do anything, and humans are inherently messy creatures. They cut corners and make mistakes, especially when working overtime and on tight deadlines.
DAM solutions help by enforcing a workflow that is very hard to work around creatively. Whether your files are in a cloud DAM or a network storage managed by an on-premise DAM, creating new versions is standardized for everyone.
Every new version is automatically timestamped and incremented, often with a descriptive comment attached to it. The latest revision is always marked as such in a way that is impossible to misinterpret. Old revisions can be automatically “retired” to never be used again.
Other than NAS, two commonly used solutions for version control of assets are cloud-based file-sharing services like Google Drive and Dropbox and version control systems like Git. File-sharing services are incredibly ubiquitous. An impressive number of agencies and in-house marketing teams use Google Drive to store design files, iterate on them, collaborate on creative briefs and marketing/ad copy, and manage content plans in Google Spreadsheets.
While most popular services today can store files of any type and have some form of version control built in, their simplicity has multiple downsides.
Compared to that, DAM solutions like Daminion have advanced tagging and search capabilities, support previews for many proprietary file formats, and can run on-premise.
Please see our earlier article comparing Daminion to file-sharing services for more insights.
Version control systems (VCS), like Git, can store more than programs’ source code. You can use Git to version media files and run Git on-premise. Git also makes it possible to take a version of a file and create a variation with its own history of revisions.
All this power comes at a cost.
Overall, version control systems work best when you manage plain text files. Using them to manage media files is cumbersome.
Compared to Git and other VCS, DAM solutions perform on extensive collections better because they rely on databases designed to access millions of items quickly. They also offer preview support for a wide range of file formats.
That said, the versioning capabilities of DAM solutions are more humble than those of Git. Usually, you get a simple linear history of revisions and the ability to open and download any previous version.
On-premise DAM systems are designed to scan network folders and track various changes: new files, modified files, deleted files, etc. What they do next varies between vendors.
Some DAM solutions can automatically create a new version if a file has changed on the network disk. Others have various quality-of-life features. Daminion, in particular, can recognize access rights you already have on NAS and save these settings in the DAM. After that, you can granularly adjust user rights and control various access aspects: opening files, downloading them, etc.
DAM solutions create a convenient abstraction for users to help quickly discover assets that are otherwise difficult to find. But they can do so much more when some form of version control is available.
It doesn’t take much convincing that tracking the assets’ version history should be an absolute baseline feature in DAM. Without a robust version control system, your entire operation exists in a constant state of uncertainty. Your team members question if they’re working with the most current assets, approvals get lost in email threads, and accountability becomes nearly impossible to establish.
Version control changes it all. You can finally be sure that your team always uses the latest version of brand elements and designs. Reviewing versions and providing feedback becomes simple and efficient. Accessing the entire audit trail is a few clicks away.
Most DAM solutions provide role-based access to assets. The flexibility varies greatly between specific systems. With Daminion, you can create any number of custom roles where each role grants a specific set of privileges. Here is a fairly common setup:
Administrators can do everything, including user management.
Hardware fails, and people make mistakes, but neither should be a showstopper. DAM solutions typically offer some form of backing up and restoring where you can save a snapshot of the entire database with all the metadata and revert to it when necessary.
Daminion integrates with operating system tools to offers scheduled backups of shared catalogs for on-prem customers. You can set the frequency of backups for each catalog individually. For example, a catalog with textures and HDRIs for archviz doesn’t change often, so you can back it up weekly or even monthly. However, a catalog with project files changes all the time, so it’s best to back it up every night.
See this guide for details on how to set this up in Daminion.
File names reflect brand standards. “Project_logo_v2.1.ai” gives clients, partners, and team members a sense of organized workflow, while “logo_project_v3_final_2_reallyfinal.ai” implies hasty decisions and a messy workflow.
DAM solutions like Daminion simplify managing brand consistency by enforcing a particular versioning scheme that your team can’t twist in a hurry.
Let’s talk about how version control works in DAM solutions. There are two essential concepts to understand: file-level vs metadata-level versioning and automatic vs manual versioning.
There are two ways a DAM solution can version a file: by creating new physical copies of it or by tracking changes to its metadata and saving them to a database. Each approach serves different use cases. Here is how they work.
File-level versioning boils down to creating copies of the original file with a version number increment. A typical example would be going from “brand_logo_v1.png” to “brand_logo_v2.png”. Each new file is then available as a new version, so you can easily go back and forth between revisions.
This approach works best when you need to track visual changes between versions. On the flip side, physical copies need more storage, especially for large media files like high-res video renders.
Metadata-level versioning deals with changes in a file’s metadata, such as tags, categories, usage rights, etc. Typically, DAM solutions have more complex metadata support than authoring applications. Fetching changes in files’ metadata automatically has the danger of overwriting tags’ hierarchy that was added by the DAM solution. That’s why solutions like Daminion version-control files with metadata changes, but manage the metadata separately while allowing to read tags from files.
This approach is designed to track metadata changes, for example, for legal compliance reasons. It doesn’t work when you need to capture visual changes.
That said, while authoring and DAM programs can embed IPTC and XMP metadata into JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and PSD files, they can also create sidecar XMP files.
To sum it up:
Both automated and manual versioning have advantages and drawbacks.
With automated versioning, a DAM solution detects that you saved a file on the storage and automatically creates a new version or prompts you to do that. There are several advantages to this approach.
Automatic versioning typically results in atomic changes between versions. This is often an inadvertent result of saving often to avoid losing work due to software crashes. But this makes it easy to roll changes back to a specific file state. It’s also straightforward for users: all they have to do is work normally, while the DAM system takes care of everything and keeps all the records of who changed what and when.
On the other hand, the frequent saving of large media files results in excessive storage use. Moreover, some users may prefer having more control and creating a new version only when necessary.
With manual versioning, the user checks out a file managed by a DAM system, makes edits locally, and then checks the changed file back in. This way, the user has the ultimate control over what qualifies as a new version and can add some context. This video demonstrates how it works in Daminion:
The human factor may be the most significant disadvantage of manual versioning because this approach relies heavily on user discipline.
In other words:
Daminion doesn’t support automatic versioning. However, AI tags automatically transition from one version to another.
Version control has been a standard DAM feature for years. All major solutions like Daminion, Bynder, Acquia DAM, Cloudinary, and Brandfolder have it. There are some interesting implementation specifics in all of the above, but the larger picture here is how your approach to versioning affects your choice between cloud DAM and on-prem DAM systems.
We recently covered this topic in a dedicated blog post. Let’s summarize the key findings here.
Pros of cloud DAMs:
Cons:
Then, what would work for you?
Cloud DAMs can be perfect for teams working in unregulated industries and without restrictive internal data management policies. For everybody else, an on-prem DAM solution may be preferable and often the only viable option.
Here are the major advantages of on-prem DAM solutions:
In certain scenarios, it’s beneficial to use both cloud and on-prem DAM solutions. For example, if you are working on a brochure in Adobe InDesign and you need to make edits from multiple computers, e.g., do the layout and typesetting and then use InCopy to proofread, you likely want a cloud solution. But you also want the benefits of running an on-prem DAM system for enhanced data control.
For such creative workflows specifically, Daminion makes it possible to get a hybrid workflow using its Adobe CC Connector, which is available separately. The connector will sync files between on-prem Daminion and Adobe Creative Cloud to preserve links to images and vector graphics, with the added benefit of using medium-resolution versions of images to keep INDD files compact.
The connector supports both InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, and Photoshop files.
Let’s review the key insights and highlight actionable best practices you can implement.
Here are some of the things you can do to ensure robust version control of your digital assets.
Use a DAM with at least some elements of automated history tracking. This will help create a transparent audit trail that eliminates confusion about asset history and development.
Restrict edits to approved users so that only authorized team members can create new versions. To do that, set up roles that support your existing workflows and align with information security policies.
Backup assets with metadata. Ensure your version control strategy includes backups that preserve not just the files themselves but all associated metadata, both embedded and available in sidecar XMP files.
Daminion’s on-premise solution offers robust version control features that help teams maintain order even in the most complex asset libraries. Manual versioning gives you complete control over revisions, role-based access streamlines collaboration between team members, and advanced backup capabilities that protect your valuable assets.
Request a demo today to see how Daminion can transform your digital asset management workflow with professional-grade version control capabilities.
