Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager

Images are easy peasy DAM material. Unless you can handle other media types, this won’t be taken seriously, because that’s when things get hard.

Real companies aren’t struggling to manage thousands of 10KB JPEG files, they are having issues with thousands of 2GB PSD files that they want to show up on their website as images.

I work for a DAM, and have seen The Shit. “But don’t use 2GB PSD files” is NOT an acceptable answer. That is not how these teams work. They are not engineers. They are managers, designers, marketing people, etc. The entire point of a DAM is to turn garbage into gold. If you can’t accept that, you won’t succeed.

One sliver of DAM is rasterizing ALL non-raster files for thumbnail preview. Seriously, all files. Yes, people want thumbnail previews of PowerPoint files, and they better look good, too.

It gets so complex that an entire product exists for just this (amongst other things): https://www.blitline.com Yeah yeah “it’s just imagemagick as a service” but go try running that yourself, for every type of file, warts and all.

Sometimes a file won’t have an extension, or have the wrong extension entirely. Sometimes a file won’t have metadata. Sometimes the CDN you are downloading a file from will not support range requests, or return 200 but with an error in the body, instead of the file bytes. You will never have checksums given to you to validate downloaded file integrity.

It will get complicated and messy. This is ONE OF the hard problems you are solving so that others don’t have to— your value proposition.

Anyway, good luck!

Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company.

So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library:

https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc...

Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves them from your web server using its static HTTP serving configuration (e.g. typically via Apache HTTP Server). The uploads are simple and 1:1, whatever you upload through the browser ends up on the web server as a file.

But usually, a media library could "do more" with those assets -- it could resize them, convert them to web-optimized assets (e.g. WebP), could create thumbnails and crops for different page layouts, could serve the content from a CDN. And that's just images, but there are other things you could do for PDFs (create a searchable index), MSOffice files (auto-convert to PDFs), or videos (extract thumbnails, re-encode in other resolutions, serve from video CDN or hosted video player service, like Wistia or Vimeo).

Of course, if you don't use WordPress, perhaps your CMS doesn't have a media library function at all, in which case a DAM might be even more helpful. This seems to be the case for a number of static site generators (SSGs), for example.

On a quick glance, it looks like Daminik is going after this with a separate open source project (written in PHP), and for its alpha is focusing on image management (using ImageMagick under the hood for image conversions). It also seems like it has built in support for uploading assets to Amazon S3, which would mean presumably you could very easily put the AWS CloudFront CDN on top.

(I run a personal WordPress site, and the way I personally handle this is to live with the built-in WP media library, but then put Cloudflare caching and CDN atop at the edge.)

Thought my browser froze because I can't scroll down on home page. Show full screenshot :)

I am looking for an Open Source DAM for my game dev assets. (If anyone has any suggestions?) This only supports images, not sound and 3d Models or other assets, right now. It does support tags. The built-in CDN may be helpful for web projects, though!

Good luck on your project, the hosted version seems much more responsive than NextCloud. so it may be a great tool for simpler needs!

My personal approach, especially these days, with Open Source solutions, is not just to go start hosting it ourselves. I wish to have a hosted version, and I start by trial or pay but with the peace-of-mind feeling that I can bring it in-house and host it ourselves. Honestly, I don't trust myself to maintain critical infrastructures.

I was looking for something similar, but I'm not ready to start doing it myself. I would love a hosted version.

On a nostalgic note, I think yours is akin to the story of how Flickr started - Image hosting was a side thing that they needed and it went on to become a product on its own.

You may want to list clearly somewhere which types of digital asset you support, because different industries have different ideas about that.

This only handles images, correct? And not video, audio, Office documents, PDFs, 3D models and animations, CAD/CAM drawings, PCB layouts, web pages, or code?

I'm a little confused about which DAM use cases this solves today, and which ones are next. Devs often do not understand the details or complexity of the use cases you are dealing with and can't work out how to slot this project in.

If you are looking to drive revenue eventually from this project I'd think about the compliance and asset usage angles. It may be cheap and easy to implement reporting features which will get you adoption. My experience with DAM has been that people will try to avoid integrating with a DAM, so it's hard to achieve the vision of everyone using it by opting in. If you are reporting on who's using old assets, assets are reused inappropriately, who needs to be contacted to replace something etc. it will be much easier to get adoption. Then push on the other parts of the DAM vision.

Seems like there’s some confusion about what this is. I read it as an open source alternative to something like https://www.imgix.com (a product we used at my last company). Granted there are a lot of those (e.g. imageproxy) but this one seems to have a GUI on top.

Always kind of lame but “open source version is X” does communicate pretty clearly what it’s for. Is there an X?

Nice! Like others have said it's not scrollable on mobile

Haven't seen Symfony in OSS projects for years! I'm glad it's still around :-)

Congrats on the alpha, that's always an exciting time. Given this is an open source project, I think some clearer documentation about the system architecture and components would be a great improvement. I'd also want to know up front where my assets are being processed. I had to dig into the code a bit to find the imagga tagging functionality. Some users may feel uncomfortable uploading assets to a third party if you're not absolutely up front about where the data is being sent. I'm curious about the built in CDN, so documentation on that would help me make an informed decision on using this product.

Congrats! One small suggestion - use built instead of build in the hero text.

Daminik is a simple & scalable Digital Asset Manager with a built in Content Delivery Network.

All the best for your launch!

> Daminik is a simple & scalable Digital Asset Manager with a build in Content Delivery Network.

Very minor thing, but that should be “built-in”.

For some reason, the website is in German. I can't change the language.

What's the difference betweeen a folder, a collection, and favorites? And perhaps more importantly, can I delete those categories and start with a blank slate?

Congratulations on the launch!

The lack of scroll on the landing page is infuriating. I know it's such a minor complaint (and others have mentioned it) but I had my devtools open inspecting the page before I realized it was meant to be that way.

Also the landing page doesn't tell me what this is, maybe I'm just not in the right field but I have no clue why I'd need this. Reading your description here left me even more confused, so we store images like logos and when we update it here then everything else updates because it's pulling the image from a CDN that Daminik provides? How often does something like that actually work? If a logo changes I'd need to resize/design it for 4-5 different sizes/color schemes minimum. Even just an image changing means I probably need a @2x/@3x size as well, there is never "one image to rule them all".

I assume this isn't something I'd ever have a use for based on what I understand about it so far but it might just not be well explained.

The landing page is in German for me. Is it on purpose?

"Digital Asset Manager" sounds like a bitcoin ETF to me

Your site does not work on mobile. It's impossible to scroll At least in Vivaldi mobile.