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Understanding Digital Asset Management

Digital asset management is one of those terms that you often hear mentioned - DAM for short.

But what exactly is digital asset management, and is it useful for your business?

What is it?

Digital asset management is largely what it says on tin: the organisation and management of digital assets.

Digital asset management systems facilitate this organisation, uploading, storing, and categorising all your files.

But it’s more than just file storage. Hard drives, Google Drive, Dropbox and the like are all file storage systems. You save/upload files there and then access them.

That file storage is just one small part of a DAM system. It’s more focused on the set-up, the organisation, and the workflow requirements of how and why you use digital assets.

Why is digital asset management useful?

That’s why DAMs are so useful; they make finding and accessing all your assets so much easier than traditional file storage.

A digital asset can be anything – word documents, PDFs, images, videos, Photoshop files, InDesign files, spreadsheets, etc.

If it’s digital, a good DAM system can store it.

Once your assets are stored in a centralised location – where every member of your team can access them as and when they need – finding what you need is simple and effective.

Advanced categorisation and tagging options mean teams can effectively organise all their assets into a system that makes sense to them, and powerful search engines in DAM systems help users quickly find the perfect file they need.

Better still, managers can add notes and instructions to files, so users know they have found the correct, most up-to-date asset they need.

The key is in metadata
This search is effective because of metadata, one of the essential features of a DAM system.

Metadata refers to any kind of additional information that is added to a digital asset. This could be technical details or user-generated content.

For example, if you were uploading images to your DAM system, you could add a variety of metadata tags that detail what is in the image – so when marketing need to find a relevant photo they can just search for the key words they want and download the perfect image.

If you were sharing brand guidelines and logos, each different logo file might have metadata detailing where each type of logo should be used (and where it shouldn’t).

Some of the best digital asset management software, like ResourceSpace, will allow you to create your own categories of metadata, relevant to your business, so you can assign all of the most useful information that your staff might need to know.

How does it help your business?

A digital asset management system can be extremely beneficial to businesses big and small because:

  • It efficiently stores and organises all of your digital assets – every file type!

  • It streamlines workflows, making finding the file you need much easier and quicker

  • It allows you to control your assets more effectively – so you always get the right image, logo, video or document – when you need it.


There are many more advanced features that good DAM systems can offer too, including versioning, user permissions, file conversion, and advanced sharing & integration options. These are all standard features for ResourceSpace users.

They all help to make business operations smoother and more efficient, so it’s definitely worth exploring the range of DAM options currently available.

11, September 2018, neo optic