Making Visual Archives Easier to Share and Maintain

The Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Antwerp, Belgium, is a leading academic institute focused on advancing science and health through research, education, professional services, and capacity building for partner institutions worldwide.

ITM’s work spans three scientific departments—Biomedical Sciences, Clinical Sciences, and Public Health—covering research on pathogens, patients, and populations. The institute also operates a specialized outpatient clinic, provides support services, and employs over 400 staff.

Before adopting Daminion, ITM used another DAM system that no longer matched their needs. The tool wasn’t intuitive, and the team was reluctant to rely on it in day-to-day work. One of the biggest limitations was collaboration: external contributors couldn’t upload or participate, which slowed down workflows and created bottlenecks for the communications team.

As ITM’s image collection continued to grow, it became clear they needed a new solution—one that could support a collaborative structure and keep pace with the demands of daily communications work.

ITM manages a large collection of visuals stored on internal servers and uses images every day for communication, publishing, and outreach. Daminion gave the team a centralized library where assets can be structured, categorized, and accessed quickly by both internal users and external partners.

The communications team can now locate files on the go and respond faster—without losing time searching across folders or recreating work.

When deadlines are tight, speed matters. Before Daminion, if the team couldn’t find the right file quickly enough, they sometimes had to search for alternatives online—even when the original image already existed in their archive.

Using Daminion helps us to be more efficient...

We are always under pressure. Before, if we couldn’t find the right file quickly enough we had to go online… and search for an alternative on Shutterstock, even though we had this image in our library. The turnaround speed is important to us and Daminion helps us be more efficient with our time.