Investing in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is critical for organizations in today’s digital-first landscape. The sheer volume of digital content—spanning marketing materials, product images, videos, documents, and more—continues to grow exponentially, creating an urgent need for tools that provide structure, control, and efficiency in managing these assets. This is Digital Asset Management.

While the demand for DAM solutions has skyrocketed, so too has the number and variety of DAM systems available. Some DAM systems offer unique capabilities tailored to specific industries, workflows, and business goals.

Today, there are hundreds of DAM systems to choose from, making the selection process a non-trivial task.

The complexity and nuance of these choices mean that finding the “Cinderella” DAM—the one that fits your organization’s needs perfectly—requires a deep understanding of not only what each system offers but also how it aligns with your workflows, integrates with other business systems, and fits with your long-term objectives.

Seeking expert advice from ACRODAM can save time, money, and frustration, ensuring that the DAM you select truly becomes a strategic resource for your organization.

Core DAM Functionality

At their core, almost all DAM systems share a foundational set of features designed to manage digital assets effectively. These include:

1. Storage Location: The vast majority of DAM solutions provide options to where the assets are going to be stored. Although there are a small number of systems that allow for on-prem installations (where the files are stored locally), most solutions today are cloud hosted, offering file storage as part of the cost and where the location of the cloud storage can be directed. This is an important decision when thinking about data privacy laws and fast access. 
2. File Format Support: DAM systems typically support common image file formats such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, CameraRAW, MP4, as well as document formats including PDFs and Word files. 
3. Metadata Management: DAM systems work by extracting, indexing, and displaying information about the files you add to the DAM. This metadata might include information captured at source such as the camera make and model, lens information, whether the flash went off, as well as file creation dates, and potentially location information such as latitude, longitude, and altitude to provide exceptionally rich context for each digital asset.
4. Metadata & AI: In addition to process and system-generated metadata many DAM systems support additional metadata field values known as ‘custom metadata’ which can be added manually or automatically through rules, triggers and conditional automation. Additionally most systems today offer options to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance metadata. Metadata can either co-exist in both the DAM while being embedded in the original asset (where the assets supports embedded metadata), or could be set, field by field to exist exclusively in the DAM.
5. Leveraging Existing Logical Organisational Structure: Some DAM systems build metadata from the asset’s original file path, adding folder and sub-folders names as keywords and categories. Some display assets in folders and sub-folders in the same structure they might have appeared within the operating systems (OS). Some DAM systems use AI with goal of enriching metadata to improve search while ignoring any legacy structure.
6. User Permissions: DAM systems typically allow for different user permissions where additional privileges can be granted to certain users to add, modify or delete metadata to build complex, hierarchical metadata structures and taxonomy tailored to specific needs.