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Show HN: Daminik – An Open source digital asset manager (daminik.com)
129 points by poolie 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments
Hey guys! We just published our little open source project on GitHub and would love to get some feedback. It's a very early release (alpha) but we thought it would be better to do it earlier so that we could get direct feedback.

Over the last 10 years we have built small to large web-projects of all kind. Almost every project involved managing images and files in one way or another. How do we manage our images and where? What happens if an image or logo changes, does it get updated across all sites? Which Host/CDN to choose? Is everything we do GDPR-compliant? With Daminik, we are trying to build a simple solution to solve these problems. One DAM with an integrated CDN. That’s it.

You can check it out at: https://daminik.com/?ref=hackernews (hackernews being the invitation code)

Repo: https://github.com/daminikhq/daminik

We would love to get your guys feedback on our alpha.




Images are easy peasy DAM material. Unless you can handle other media types, this won’t be taken seriously, because that’s when things get hard.

Real companies aren’t struggling to manage thousands of 10KB JPEG files, they are having issues with thousands of 2GB PSD files that they want to show up on their website as images.

I work for a DAM, and have seen The Shit. “But don’t use 2GB PSD files” is NOT an acceptable answer. That is not how these teams work. They are not engineers. They are managers, designers, marketing people, etc. The entire point of a DAM is to turn garbage into gold. If you can’t accept that, you won’t succeed.

One sliver of DAM is rasterizing ALL non-raster files for thumbnail preview. Seriously, all files. Yes, people want thumbnail previews of PowerPoint files, and they better look good, too.

It gets so complex that an entire product exists for just this (amongst other things): https://www.blitline.com Yeah yeah “it’s just imagemagick as a service” but go try running that yourself, for every type of file, warts and all.

Sometimes a file won’t have an extension, or have the wrong extension entirely. Sometimes a file won’t have metadata. Sometimes the CDN you are downloading a file from will not support range requests, or return 200 but with an error in the body, instead of the file bytes. You will never have checksums given to you to validate downloaded file integrity.

It will get complicated and messy. This is ONE OF the hard problems you are solving so that others don’t have to— your value proposition.

Anyway, good luck!


good point. there's also the other extreme end of the spectrum, which hn has a participant: photoroom.

which is basically the disposable camera of DAM.


Weirdly I know about this category of software from a prior life working at a major CMS company.

So, "digital asset managers" (DAMs) are basically fancy versions of the WordPress media library:

https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/media-library-sc...

Why might a fancy version be needed? Well, the basic media library bundled with WordPress just uploads files directly into a web server directory, and then serves them from your web server using its static HTTP serving configuration (e.g. typically via Apache HTTP Server). The uploads are simple and 1:1, whatever you upload through the browser ends up on the web server as a file.

But usually, a media library could "do more" with those assets -- it could resize them, convert them to web-optimized assets (e.g. WebP), could create thumbnails and crops for different page layouts, could serve the content from a CDN. And that's just images, but there are other things you could do for PDFs (create a searchable index), MSOffice files (auto-convert to PDFs), or videos (extract thumbnails, re-encode in other resolutions, serve from video CDN or hosted video player service, like Wistia or Vimeo).

Of course, if you don't use WordPress, perhaps your CMS doesn't have a media library function at all, in which case a DAM might be even more helpful. This seems to be the case for a number of static site generators (SSGs), for example.

On a quick glance, it looks like Daminik is going after this with a separate open source project (written in PHP), and for its alpha is focusing on image management (using ImageMagick under the hood for image conversions). It also seems like it has built in support for uploading assets to Amazon S3, which would mean presumably you could very easily put the AWS CloudFront CDN on top.

(I run a personal WordPress site, and the way I personally handle this is to live with the built-in WP media library, but then put Cloudflare caching and CDN atop at the edge.)


This type of tool is definitely useful.

Once you start managing multiple properties and want to keep consistent branding across not only your website but all the social media sites and all the listing services like Yelp etc.

Constantly digging up the right asset, at the right resolution, and dealing with CompanyX-Logo-New222-Real.png like in the stone age before version management.


What can i say, pixelmonkey! this!

It's funny that you mention WordPress, because that's one of the main reasons why we developed Daminik. Many of our customers use WordPress, most of them are from the publishing industry. All of them use some kind of DAM, either a local one or one in the cloud. Some of the tools also provide a WordPress plugin. However, what all of these tools currently do is copy the assets into the WordPress media library instead of taking the URL/File from the DAM/CDN. This creates a lot of duplicates that nobody can maintain.

One of the most important things on our roadmap is the development of a WordPress plugin to fix this problem. Will be ready soon.


You might be interested in Tachyon https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon-plugin, an image resizing service built to be used with Amazon S3 as the image backend, AWS Lambda (or any node.js server) to process images using sharp, and sits behind a CDN such as CloudFront or CloudFlare.

Disclaimer: my employer (but I don’t work on the project).


Sounds interesting. Where has the main repo for Tachyon gone though? https://github.com/humanmade/tachyon says it has been disabled.


A copyright claim was made against us for the name. GH disabled the repo, someone's on it. Here's the wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231130054737/https://github.co...


That’s news to me I’ll find out next week and update.


Thought my browser froze because I can't scroll down on home page. Show full screenshot :)


Same... a simple website footer would help signal this is the end of the page


I am looking for an Open Source DAM for my game dev assets. (If anyone has any suggestions?) This only supports images, not sound and 3d Models or other assets, right now. It does support tags. The built-in CDN may be helpful for web projects, though!

Good luck on your project, the hosted version seems much more responsive than NextCloud. so it may be a great tool for simpler needs!


this comment brought flickr memories


My personal approach, especially these days, with Open Source solutions, is not just to go start hosting it ourselves. I wish to have a hosted version, and I start by trial or pay but with the peace-of-mind feeling that I can bring it in-house and host it ourselves. Honestly, I don't trust myself to maintain critical infrastructures.

I was looking for something similar, but I'm not ready to start doing it myself. I would love a hosted version.

On a nostalgic note, I think yours is akin to the story of how Flickr started - Image hosting was a side thing that they needed and it went on to become a product on its own.


There is a hosted version, just click on »Register now for free« and enter the »hackernews« invitation code :)


Brilliant. Now, the final missing piece - custom domains (can be paid option). I need to be able to continue to use my domains by just pointing to your service.

So, I want "https://cdn.daminik.com/dam-2024-91b1f1b/oinam/picture.jpg" to be "https://cdn.oinam.com/dam-2024-91b1f1b/oinam/picture.jpg"


You may want to list clearly somewhere which types of digital asset you support, because different industries have different ideas about that.

This only handles images, correct? And not video, audio, Office documents, PDFs, 3D models and animations, CAD/CAM drawings, PCB layouts, web pages, or code?


you are right, it's only images in the alpha-version, we should make that clearer. we are working on the integration of audio and video next.

thanks for the feedback!


I'm a little confused about which DAM use cases this solves today, and which ones are next. Devs often do not understand the details or complexity of the use cases you are dealing with and can't work out how to slot this project in.

If you are looking to drive revenue eventually from this project I'd think about the compliance and asset usage angles. It may be cheap and easy to implement reporting features which will get you adoption. My experience with DAM has been that people will try to avoid integrating with a DAM, so it's hard to achieve the vision of everyone using it by opting in. If you are reporting on who's using old assets, assets are reused inappropriately, who needs to be contacted to replace something etc. it will be much easier to get adoption. Then push on the other parts of the DAM vision.


Seems like there’s some confusion about what this is. I read it as an open source alternative to something like https://www.imgix.com (a product we used at my last company). Granted there are a lot of those (e.g. imageproxy) but this one seems to have a GUI on top.

Always kind of lame but “open source version is X” does communicate pretty clearly what it’s for. Is there an X?


Nice! Like others have said it's not scrollable on mobile


Also not scrollable on Desktop

Edit: As others have said, apparently that's just the bad landing page design not a scrolling issue.


Haven't seen Symfony in OSS projects for years! I'm glad it's still around :-)


Congrats on the alpha, that's always an exciting time. Given this is an open source project, I think some clearer documentation about the system architecture and components would be a great improvement. I'd also want to know up front where my assets are being processed. I had to dig into the code a bit to find the imagga tagging functionality. Some users may feel uncomfortable uploading assets to a third party if you're not absolutely up front about where the data is being sent. I'm curious about the built in CDN, so documentation on that would help me make an informed decision on using this product.


Congrats! One small suggestion - use built instead of build in the hero text.

Daminik is a simple & scalable Digital Asset Manager with a built in Content Delivery Network.

All the best for your launch!


thank you! going to fix that.


> Daminik is a simple & scalable Digital Asset Manager with a build in Content Delivery Network.

Very minor thing, but that should be “built-in”.


Fixing in right now, thank you!


For some reason, the website is in German. I can't change the language.


I have the same issue. Site is in German, when I signup and confirm my email, it does give me a language option and most of the UI changes to English when I change the language... but error messages are still in German :)


What's the difference betweeen a folder, a collection, and favorites? And perhaps more importantly, can I delete those categories and start with a blank slate?

Congratulations on the launch!


The lack of scroll on the landing page is infuriating. I know it's such a minor complaint (and others have mentioned it) but I had my devtools open inspecting the page before I realized it was meant to be that way.

Also the landing page doesn't tell me what this is, maybe I'm just not in the right field but I have no clue why I'd need this. Reading your description here left me even more confused, so we store images like logos and when we update it here then everything else updates because it's pulling the image from a CDN that Daminik provides? How often does something like that actually work? If a logo changes I'd need to resize/design it for 4-5 different sizes/color schemes minimum. Even just an image changing means I probably need a @2x/@3x size as well, there is never "one image to rule them all".

I assume this isn't something I'd ever have a use for based on what I understand about it so far but it might just not be well explained.


The landing page is in German for me. Is it on purpose?


"Digital Asset Manager" sounds like a bitcoin ETF to me


DAMs are a pretty common type of software


Your site does not work on mobile. It's impossible to scroll At least in Vivaldi mobile.


It is the visual design. The design seems scrollable but it isn't. Suggestion for the team - terminate the image by wrapping in a container of sort and not touch the bottom browser chrome.


It doesn't scroll at all, the body has overflow hidden by design.


It also doesn't scroll on desktop


what @tojaprice said. just a very simple landingpage for now.


But on mobile all i can see is the content up to the “Star on github” button…

Everything else is just cut off


understood, we will fix that. thank you!




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