From Sleepless Nights to a Six-Hour Workflow with Daminion

The Documentatiecentrum voor Aalst Karnaval (DAK) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to document all aspects of the world-famous Aalst Carnival — a three-day festival held every year in Aalst, Belgium.

In 2010, Aalst Carnival was added to UNESCO’s list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The DAK team works tirelessly to ensure that every parade, costume, and creative moment is preserved for future generations.

Each year, the organization produces a comprehensive 300-page book and a photo album featuring at least three photos per group of participants. To make this possible, they collect around 10,000 photos submitted by in-house photographers and festival-goers from around the world.

Once the submission deadline closes, the team faces a race against time — uploading, renaming, sorting, and verifying thousands of images before selecting the top 100 for publication, all within just 24 hours.

Before adopting Daminion, DAK’s workflow for processing 10,000 images involved several manual, error-prone steps:

-> Creating multiple backups to prevent data loss or overwriting
-> Renaming every file manually to avoid duplicate filenames
-> Converting RAW images to JPG for previews (over four hours wasted)
-> Sorting photos into separate folders for each group
-> Copying and moving files repeatedly for final selection

Each of these steps cost time and introduced opportunities for mistakes.

The team had tried multiple approaches, hardware configurations, and different software solutions, but none offered the speed, teamwork capabilities, and flexibility needed for their demanding schedule.

Personally, I’m still amazed we ever managed to do the job the way we did for so many years!

Daminion completely transformed the way DAK manages its festival archives.

With Daminion:

✓ The entire process — from import to final selection — now takes just 6 hours instead of 24.

✓ Multiple users can import and tag images simultaneously, without conflicts.

✓ Files are automatically renamed on import using configurable templates.

✓ Predefined tags are added automatically, reducing the risk of human error.

✓ Daminion displays RAW thumbnails instantly, removing the need for manual conversion.

The new system also eliminated the need for nested folders and manual grouping. DAK now keeps all photos in a single folder and uses custom tags for quick grouping, filtering, and selection.

✓ Processing time reduced from 24 hours to 6 hours.

✓ Centralized archive with no duplicates or redundant copies.

✓ Quick search and tagging across 10K+ photos.

✓ Reliable backup of a single, well-structured folder

✓ Protection from accidental edits with server-based version control.

✓ Exceptional technical support and regular software updates.

…without Daminion, we had to choose between getting some sleep and delivering the best results.

Daminion provides teamwork, is fast, accurate, and still affordable for non-profit organizations. It’s not too complex to set up and doesn’t require special hardware or costly server licenses. Huge time savings when importing, sorting, and selecting a top 100 out of 8,000 new assets within 6 hours! It took us two days before.