A wonderful rant by David Gewirtz on ZDNet – My infuriatingly unsuccessful quest for a good media asset management tool:

“There is a category called "Digital Asset Management" out there as well. These are enterprise-level products, often Web-based. You can begin to tell they'll be trouble because there's no price for the product on the site. Almost all providers of DAM tools have a "let us have an expert call you" button.

[…] I'm also disappointed in the Web-based and enterprise-based solutions.

First, the barrier of entry is huge. There appears to be a disconnect between the needs of a professional designer with thousands of images and a large corporation buying an enterprise package.

Second, most of the Web gallery and enterprise solutions still use relatively primative upload dialogs and download buttons. There are very few solutions that will let you drag from a Web page into a desktop application, or to the desktop, and do it for a bunch of images, and those that do also seem to think the only type of image that exists is based on bitmaps.”