Structure for growth
building a DAM that's ready to scale
Remember last year, when I promised a post on setting up a DAM structure after you completed a content audit? Promise kept (finally).
Organization is probably something we are all pretty comfortable with if we are working in digital asset management. This job can be a slog if you don’t find pleasure in figuring out the best way to store and share assets. But if you, like me, see the above photo of succulents and can think of 3 ways to divide and arrange them (shape, color, size), you’re in the right place.
When it comes to DAM structure, talking to your team and content stakeholders should get you started on some structure options. It might get messier before your structure is organized. Will you first divide assets at the highest level by content type, then year, or vice-versa? I’ve seen a variety of DAM structures work, but there has to be:
logic behind the decisions
a plan to scale
group consensus on the choices
For example, say you want to organize a group of partner logos in the DAM. You have about 500 companies’ logos, both print and web versions, in color and black and white. Modern DAMs are searchable, so folder depth is not necessary or desirable. In this case, you could structure the folders as
Logos > “Company Name” > Print (contain all the print versions of color & b/w logos)
> Web (contain all the web versions of color & b/w logos)
But a Logos folder containing 500 subfolders isn’t ideal. So much scrolling! Maybe there are other ways to break that 500 number into more reasonable (like groups of 50?) chunks. With partner logos, I have seen them divided into industries, locations, or even the projects they support. Make the decision and share it with your team to ensure it also makes sense to them.
Logos > “Industry” > “Company Name” > Print
> Web
If there’s a dilemma, remember, the assets are still searchable and the structure is flexible, not carved in stone. At this stage in building, I am usually still working within a spreadsheet to create the DAM structure. Even once assets have been migrated or ingested into the DAM, you can add a level of structure or move assets as needed.
About that spreadsheet. This step is particularly helpful when your team includes people less comfortable with DAM technology or who are visual learners. Share early and often and use the agreed-upon structure to help review naming conventions, abbreviation planning, and site mapping, and only then build the tag library (which I find much less flexible in most systems) in your platform along with the DAM folder structure.
In DAMs that can have thousands of assets, putting in the thought early in the planning of how to structure to scale can be the difference between a successful and active platform and one that quickly becomes disorganized and disused. The decisions you make might seem arbitrary (logos/color/company name might work just as well as logos/company name/color in your case), but the conversation and decisions alone will result in a clear and sharable structure ready to welcome more assets as you grow.