Few resources on the topic
- http://www.dpci.com/blog/making-case-digital-asset-management
It is odd that not many seem to be doing this. I would think a centralized repository of assets and way to upload things would be in order. Instead of having some weird asset pipeline in nodejs, I could submit all of my assets into a repo with some versioning scheme to follow. I could update assets and/or push to any CDN via a UI. Sharing assets between projects. Asset Discovery. etc. I have notes on this and what I desire. Really would like to make the development environment experience easier with regards to assets.
Seems like a lot of benefits over any potential downsides. I'm looking into making my own software, but I'm likely not to open source it as I will not have any free time to cover other's use cases.
I would say go use Cloudinary if you can afford it. Seems to be the closest thing to asset management with CDN push.
So Why not a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress as the DAM?
Resources:- https://www.isovera.com/blog/digital-asset-management-systems-vs-drupal-whats-dam-difference
It is a good question given some of the perceived and actual benefits. You get media, auth, content serving in one package. My answer would be to not equate functionality to what appears to be desired and furthermore side effects can render the implemented functionality undesired. A CMS can act like a managed organized file server on a small scale until time is taken out and pain endured in the future to migrate away in the future (foreseeable tech-debt). Checking out every project's asset or even history is not desired. One case is if I am a new developer or artist, I want to check out relevant projects' and common assets on to my local computer to work with. CMS, from what I know, would have all media in different folders (images, videos, etc. or just one called content split by month/date) instead of by tag. Tags can be used for project naming and versioning (if necessary). If the directories can be custom named then what stops git sub-moduling of asset folders?