GTDUG Digital Asset Management Case Study

GT Drupal Users Group (GTDUG) - 2013 - Eric Sembrat
Digital Asset Management
Photo Resource Management in Drupal
A Case Study

About Me

Web Developer for
College of Sciences
Graduate Student at
Georgia State University
Twitter - @esembrat
http://ericsembrat.com
Eric Sembrat

Game Plan

Our plan tonight is simple:
1. The Problem
2. The Research
3. The Plan
4. The Product
5. The Future
6. Questions? Comments?
Game Plan

The Problem

Scene: College of Sciences: Deans Oﬃce.
The original Digital Asset Management
(DAM) system was composed of:
• All assets located on a Shared
Network Drive.
• Stored in various ﬁle formats.
• No metadata present.
Setting the Stage

Metadata was available in two ways:
• On paper.
• Photo releases, student names.
• With Personnel.
• Memory of events, locations, etc.
It just was not being utilized.
Metadata

Files were stored using multiple image
formats:
• .CR2
• .TIF
• .JPG/.PNG
Lossless formats ended up hampering
OS photo preview capabilities.
File Formats

Nutshell
Complexity of
Asset Access
No Preset
Standardizations
Haphazard Storage
Speciﬁcations
A Mess

When I started work at Georgia Tech in
July 2012, I devoted my free time to
planning out a solution to this problem.
The concept was simple:
• Can’t this DAM be managed via
software?
• Can I make the software more ﬂexible
than what the campus oﬀers?
The Goal

The Research

Before diving into building a system from
the ground up, it would make sense to
look at existing systems.
ResourceSpace showed up as one of the
few open source solutions that were
ﬂexible and feature-complete.
Most software was fairly limited.
Reinvent the Wheel?

ResourceSpace

However, ResourceSpace wasn’t as slick
as I was hoping for.
The ease of customization and design I
had become accustomed to in Drupal
was non-existent.
Moreover, the plugin community in
ResourceSpace is slim-to-none.
Researching

Moreover, limited use-case tests with the
target audience showed that the system,
workﬂow, upload process, and language
was all unwieldy.
Rather than hacking together changes
that would not be scalable to upgrades, I
thought:
“Why not build this in Drupal?”
Usability

The Plan

The plan with designing DAM was to
take:
Planning out DAM
Best Features of
ResourceSpace
Drupal’s Flexibility+ = DAM

Planning out DAM
Best Features of
ResourceSpace
Multiple File
Uploads
File-Speciﬁc
Metadata
Tag-Based
Searching
Batch-File
Meta-tagging

Planning out DAM
Drupal’s Flexibility
CAS Views Panels Taxonomy
Content Types Theming

The Product

Finished Product

Content Type
Photo Album contains:
• Title
• Description
• Category (Taxonomy)
• Photo Uploads
• .CR2
• .TIF
• .JPG/.PNG
- Multiupload Fileﬁeld Widget
- Multiupload Imageﬁeld Widget
- File entity
- File entity inline
- File Entity Preview Multiple
- File MIME

File Fields
• Multiupload Filefield Widget & Multiupload
Imagefield Widget
• Allows multiple photos to be uploaded at once.
• File entity, File entity inline, & File Entity Preview
Multiple
• Allows file previews to appear when editing a
photo album.
• File MIME
• Treats raw photos as Images rather than Files.

Photo Processing
Photo Processing:
- ImageMagick
- im_raw
- ImageMagick Advanced
ImageMagick - Basic Photo
Conversions from RAW to
Lossy.
im_raw - Allows raw
ImageMagick commands.
ImageMagick Advanced -
Allows ﬁle extension renaming.

Taxonomies
Tagging:
- Taxonomy
- Taxonomy display
- Tagadelic
- TagadelicViews
Taxonomy Display - Override
default taxonomy page with
View.
Tagadelic - Tag clouds.

Taxonomies

The Future

DAM has been in place since December
2012, although it has gone through a few
iterations since its initial release.
• Changes to site workflow for tagging.
• Simplifications of views/displays.
• Patches for taxonomy_access,
imagemagick, entity, and
multiupload_filefield_widget.
The Future

Access has been opened slightly to allow
select members to download photography
and assist in tagging / identifying.
However, DAM is still very much a CoS-
internal system.
Access

DAM also works with video - although it is
restricted to logging and tagging CoS-
uploaded videos on YouTube.
For us, there is no current need for a
video database of raw campus-shot video
ﬁles.
Potential for Video

One major goal of constructing DAM was
to minimize the maintainability of
custom code.
All of DAM’s features are built using
contributed modules and patches.
Edge-Cases - File Entity Preview Multiple.
Maintainability

One future goal for this project will be
transposing the theme to the new
Georgia Tech Adaptive/Responsive
theme.
We have decided to wait on an oﬃcial GT
adaptive theme, instead of the custom
themes we have set up.
Mobile

If there is interest, some features of this
site can be exported for more
widespread-use.
Caveat - Complexity of setup would
require documentation for usage and
server conﬁguration to properly work with
the Drupal Feature/imported design.
Exportability

Demo

eric.sembrat@cos.gatech.edu
Contact information is also available on
my personal blog:
http://www.ericsembrat.com

GTDUG Digital Asset Management Case Study

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