Optimized way to manages Images in SDL Web 8.5?

Question

We are currently hosting thousands of images of different variants on our master Publication in SDL Tridion 2013. We are now planning to upgrade SDL with SDL Web 8.5 & have the following questions in our mind:

1. Added benefits we can get if we use any Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

2. Today we have some metadata associated with the Image Schema like Alt tags etc, which brings a lot of problems in terms of maintenance as when you send an image for translation it localizes the Image Components too in child publications.

   a. How can this be managed in a better way, should we include these metadata in the Component where we are going to include the images?

   b. How do we include the image in the component if we are using DAM, will it be opening the DAM repository & the URL will get rendered within Content Delivery?

3. Any recommendation on DAM which can connect with Tridion will be helpful too.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You've actually a few questions here - but I'll take the Tridion specific one #2a

One option would be to have a MM Item linked Component containing the metadata for that specific image. Each MM item would have its own* respective metadata content Component. This way, you can send the Component containing the content for translation and leave the original MM item unlocalized.

Considering the additional work - it could be a nice touch to have the event system create and connect a metadata content component when a new MM image is created and it's deemed to be of the correct type (i.e. you may want to exclude PDF downloads from the same treatment (or add specific metadata content to those too).

• of course, you could have shared content across multiple images if the business case is such

Answer 2

Let me try answer your questions:

1. The added benefit of DAM is absolutely depends on what specific business requirement do you have and which DAM system you are choosing - few of the big advantages might be in-built CDN, Image manipulations out-of-the-box, Image rendition options out-of-the-box, able to manage huge size and huge number of multimedia without any issue - Though I can confirm, we had an implementation in past where the Tridion system has few hundred thousand of images and Tridion was able to handle them well

2. Regarding localization of Metadata - one option could be as mentioned above by Saunders. Another option could be to have it implemented the way you mentioned (as I would prefer the coupling of metadata with its content itself) and then using solutions like Alchemy Plug In (specifically Relocalize Plug-In to address the issue associated with localized multimedia components)

3. The best recommended DAM system should be SDL MediaManager as it provides seamless integration with Tridion and comes as part of SDL Web suite (check the licensing conditions though). On the hand, Tridion is quite flexible and allows to extend and integrate with almost every DAM system. However, I personally feel, that you should be doing an evaluation of various DAM systems available in the market - very similar to the evaluation of CMS which might had been done while choosing Tridion for the implementation