Dean Kruger

Dean Kruger has been administering Daminion since 2011 — not at the vendor, but at the other end of it. He is Head of Research at Juice Film in Cape Town, and previously combined that role with digital asset management at Gatehouse Commercials, a production company that has been servicing commercials since 2001. Film and advertising production creates exactly the kind of archive that breaks casual systems: thousands of stills and hours of footage per job, needed again years later by someone who was not on set when it was shot.

That is the vantage point these articles are written from. They tend to cover the parts of DAM that only become visible once you have lived with a system for a few years — building a taxonomy that still makes sense in year three, where categories stop and keywords start when a team is genuinely using both, saved searches as a workaround for how people actually hunt for files, and what migrating off Phase One Media Pro involves in practice rather than in a datasheet. He also runs a YouTube channel of Daminion walkthroughs at @DaminionDean.

He is a long-time Daminion user and trainer rather than an employee, which is worth knowing when weighing his recommendations: he has no particular reason to defend a feature that irritates him. Also a street photographer, which is how the archive habit started.