Storage Isn’t Strategy
Centralized storage solves where your media lives. It doesn’t solve whether anyone can find it.
The short version: content sprawl is a metadata and governance problem before it’s a hardware problem. Get the order of operations right—people, vocabulary, workflow, platform, then storage—and every dollar after that works harder.
The diagnosis is right
Storage vendors’ guides to content sprawl usually nail the symptoms. Media scattered across workstations, aging RAID arrays, and a closet full of external drives. Nobody remembers what’s on them. New hires inherit a mystery. Drives fail quietly, and the metadata goes with them.
Where the prescription falls short
The typical vendor playbook lists the right ingredients: map your workflow, centralize storage, add an asset management layer, get users to comply. Then it spends most of its pages on the storage.
Two things get lost in that weighting. There’s no mention of a controlled vocabulary or who owns it. And people show up last—as “compliant users,” as if adoption were a policy problem instead of a design problem.
That’s how organizations end up with a digital shelf: a well-funded system nobody uses. Consolidating 40 drives onto one volume gives you one big pile instead of 40 small ones. You still can’t find what you need when you need it.
Findability doesn’t come from where files live. It comes from what’s known about them.
What actually makes content findable
AI is good at identifying objects, including human objects (aka people), but it struggles with recognizing the subjective context that brings meaning to those objects. In other words – not surprisingly – AI struggles to recognize and interpret human content.
“AI can recognize two people and a taco in a picture, but it’s not going to help anyone understand what’s actually going on,” said Kyle Henke, Aldis librarian. “Are they arguing about who gets to eat the taco? Is one of the people disappointed or envious because the other person isn’t sharing the taco?
“That kind of real interpretation requires human eyes.”
Aldis librarian Ben Zamora-Weiss frames it this way: the more transactional the task is, the better AI is.
“Transcriptions are almost flawless these days, and translations are also really well done. Facial and object recognition, or things like putting time markers in when a scene is changing in a video – fantastic.
“But when it comes to understanding the context for why a photo was taken, or why a video was created, AI isn’t there yet.”
Where AI changes the math — and where it doesn’t
Not long ago, finding every clip with a bridge meant someone logging footage by hand. Today, auto-tagging and visual search give you a real head start. That’s real progress.
But AI tags without governance create a new kind of sprawl: thousands of machine-generated keywords, inconsistent and unverified, that no one trusts for rights-sensitive use. AI accelerates good metadata practice. It doesn’t replace it.
More on that: AI for Digital Asset Management: What Actually Works
Preservation can’t wait for the perfect system
Scattered drives are also a preservation risk—and that one is urgent. Drives don’t have to die to lose data. Silent corruption and orphaned formats do it quietly. If you have legacy media on tape, optical, or aging disks, triage it now. Digitize and verify the most vulnerable, most valuable material first, then fold it into the system you design.
See: Media Deterioration
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Audit what you have and where it lives.
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Map who uses it and how—the real workflows, not the org-chart version.
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Design the taxonomy and metadata schema.
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Choose the platform that fits those workflows.
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Size storage to the platform, the formats, and the growth curve.
Storage is step five. It matters. It isn’t the strategy.
Platform agnostic, on purpose
We work many DAM platforms, and storage from on-prem arrays to Backblaze and Wasabi. We don’t sell any of it. The right stack depends on your content, your team, and your integrations—not on who wrote the whitepaper.
If your media lives in more places than you can list, start with a proper Discovery process.
