System
DAM Taxonomy — 15,000 Assets
Type
System
Format
Two-layer asset system + naming schema
From
AIR implementation · two-year digital transformation
01 · Context
When I started, the artwork lived in spreadsheets with documentation that varied piece to piece — roughly 3,000–4,000 images, and critical creative and financial details routinely lost between teams. Over two years it grew to 15,000+ assets under a single standard. I designed the structure so every field answered a question Sales or Curation actually asked — can this reproduce at the sizes clients buy? Who owns the rights? — then implemented the DAM around it. Every part of the system exists because someone downstream needed it to sell, license, reproduce, or legally share a piece.
02 · The artifact
Archive
15,000+ assets · single source of truth
Layer 1
File system of record (Drive)
Every artist has a folder; files organized by format — original, reproduction, wall covering, licensing, web upload. Artwork kept separate from production images and from sales/marketing collateral, so no one pulls the wrong asset onto a client call. Client-provided event and install material lives under the artist, flagged confidential, with use-rights tracked.
Layer 2 · AIR
The searchable layer (curation · sales · marketing)
Where accepted work becomes findable. Image specs captured at onboarding; every asset filterable by the questions a proposal actually starts from — artist, location, title, visual and style descriptors, market alignment. The tag set is extensible: a genuinely useful new descriptor gets added rather than forced into an existing field.
Naming schema
[ARTIST-LAST]_[WORK-TITLE]_[FORMAT]
e.g. Rivera_Morning@field_reproduction
Format is the load-bearing token: it routes the file to the right pipeline (original vs reproduction vs licensing vs web) and keeps sales collateral out of the production tool.
Schema fields
artist
location
title
medium
style
palette
market-alignment
rights-status
format
↳ recreated & sanitized · sample filenames illustrative · rights values generalized
03 · Outcome
assets on a single metadata standard, from ~3,000–4,000 at the start
of the reproduction collection reproducible at 50″+ — the large-format capture standard
of company revenue enabled — print-on-demand & licensing ran on this archive
This system was a revenue decision disguised as a filing system. In two years we took the capture required from none, to 40 inches, to 50 — and raising it is what made print-on-demand and licensing viable at scale. It also expanded the sellable collection: artists who couldn’t produce large physical originals could now earn from large-format reproductions. Every field earns its maintenance cost or gets cut.