Building your DAM for search

Let’s face it — most of us have a million photos buried in personal files we’ll never actually go through. If you’re that one person claiming every photo and video you own is perfectly organized, let’s call it what it is: You’re a unicorn.

Realistically, without organization, your images and videos are nearly impossible to find. Implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is the fix; when you’re in a larger environment and sharing assets between colleagues, consistent organization is vital for everyone to find assets efficiently.

When building a searchable library, you need to master three main areas:

1. Categories

   Start by determining your most important categories. This might be based on where you have the most assets or what people search for most frequently. Give these categories human-friendly names and decide how to apply metadata at the category level to save time later.

2. File naming

   A solid file naming convention is just a consistent framework for describing what a file is and how it relates to others. While there are a million ways to name a file, a few best practices are universal:

   • Avoid special characters.
   • Limit the total character length.
   • Use underscores, CamelCase, or dashes instead of periods and spaces.

   For a deep dive, check out the University of Minnesota Libraries’ guide for a detailed list of conventions.

3. Metadata

   Saving the best for last: metadata is the "secret sauce" of searchability. It answers the core questions: What? Who? and When? The more detailed your metadata, the easier it is to surface assets within a massive DAM system. While some systems now use AI for auto-tagging, you still need a human eye to ensure accuracy.

At the end of the day, consistency is key. Follow these steps, and you might just reach unicorn status yourself.

Questions about using DAMs? Reach out to Elisha Bahr at [email protected].