What Is and What Is Not a DAM
21 Jun 2026 » Content
I was visiting a customer a couple of weeks ago. One of the topics we discussed was the number of Digital Asset Management (DAM) tools that they had. They were asking us for a consolidation from all those DAMs to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. On the surface, it looked like a quick win. However, after scratching that surface a bit, we realized that the request was more complex than that.
Storage vs DAM
The first step is to define what a DAM is. Duckduckgo’s LLM, based on Adobe and Gartner, defines it as:
Digital asset management is the process of organizing, storing, and distributing digital files using specialized software, which helps create a centralized repository for easy access and management of digital assets like images, videos, and documents. It enhances efficiency, security, and accessibility while ensuring consistent use of assets across an organization.
This definition emphasizes the enterprise focus of the process and tools. It is not just a simple storage, like your hard drive or OneDrive. It does much more. One key feature (or, rather, lack of) is that your DAM should not be your working directory.
Use Cases
In order to select the right tool to store content, you need to first define the use case. Let’s see the most common.
Image and Video Creation
When a photographer is taking photos or a videographer is shooting a video, you are not expecting the content to be stored directly in a corporate storage solution. Maybe in the future, with mobile or satellite networks supporting gigabits per second, this type of content can be directly uploaded to the cloud. For now, it will go to a storage device like an SD card or a portable SSD.
You may be thinking that I am going too far with this type of storage. However, it still must be managed. If I am paying for these photos, I want to make sure that they are properly managed.
Content Editing
I will not entertain any type of local or network storage. In 2026 and in a corporate environment, I am not sure they have a purpose for content management.
Once you have the photos or the videos, it is time to edit them; in the case of text, this is where you start from. You need some type of storage where you can store, edit, and share the content. This storage should allow you and relevant people to apply changes, add comments, or approve it. It needs to be compatible with the editing software that you are using. You do not want to copy a file from A to B, edit it in B, and move it back to A. Even worse, sending emails around with the content attached. Here be dragons.
For example, with Adobe, if you are going to use Frame.io and Adobe Photoshop to edit your content, Adobe cloud storage directly integrates with them.
Types of storage that you can use in this case:
- Cloud providers: SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Adobe Document Cloud, and similar; they all allow content sharing.
- Project tool storage: as you mature in Content Supply Chain, you will want to use project management tools like Workfront, which come with their own storage.
Content Publishing
Once content is approved, it is finally ready for your marketing campaigns. Now the situation changes; the storage tools from above are usually not fit for purpose. Instead, you need a tool that allows your campaign managers to find and use the approved content, and makes it available to other campaign tools.
This is where a DAM comes into play, the whole reason for its existence. While other types of storage are meant to keep lots of content, a DAM should only contain content that is ready to be shown to customers and the rest of the world. From hundreds of photos that you have taken at the beginning of the process, only those edited and approved should be in the DAM. In other words, a DAM is not a good place to store temporary content that is still being edited, or a storage dump to keep everything.
In the case of Adobe Experience Manager Assets, these are some of the features you get:
- A folder structure and tags for easy management and search. You do not want to spend time finding the right image.
- Various renditions for images, to adjust to different screens and locations.
- Integrations with:
- AEM Sites (obviously!)
- Adobe Journey Optimizer for email, SMS and push notifications.
- Marketo.
- Workfront, to receive the approved assets.
Archival
Creating all this content does not come cheap. As an enterprise, it forms part of your intellectual property, and you may want to keep everything that has been created, even if it has never been used. For this purpose, you will want to use another type of storage, specialized for archival. You are not likely to use this content anymore, so there is no need to make it easily accessible.
You could continue using your cloud provider, but there is another solution to consider: long-term, secure, and durable storage. They tend to be cheaper than cloud storage, as they have been optimized for storage, not retrieval. Some examples are AWS Glacier, Azure Archive Blob and Google Cloud Nearline.
Final Remarks
I hope that it is now clear when and when not to use a DAM. In summary, a DAM has been designed to store published content, content that has to be accessible by multiple people, from campaign managers to end users. For all other cases, you should be looking at a solution that meets your needs.