The Challenge
Creative teams accumulate thousands of assets across shoots, campaigns, and projects. Finding the right image means remembering exact filenames or scrolling through endless folders. Sharing assets with clients means zipping folders and hoping nothing gets lost.
The tools that exist are either enterprise-grade DAMs with six-figure contracts or basic file storage with no intelligence.
The Approach
What if you could search your asset library the way you think? Not by filename or folder, but by describing what you're looking for: "that rooftop shot with the golden hour light" or "product flat lays from the Samsung campaign."
Semantic search using CLIP embeddings makes this possible. Every image gets a vector representation of its visual content, and searches match by meaning, not keywords.
The Solution
A self-hosted asset management system with AI at every layer. Claude Vision auto-generates descriptions on upload. CLIP embeddings power semantic search. Magazine-style layouts (full bleed, diptych, asymmetric grids) make browsing feel intentional, not overwhelming.
Batch uploads with parallel progress tracking. Campaign objects that group assets with metadata. Revokable magic links for client sharing with access tracking. Multi-tenancy with personal staging spaces and workspace collaboration.
The Outcome
Assets become findable by what they look like, not what someone named them. Client sharing goes from "let me zip that folder" to a single link. The personal staging space gives creatives a safe place to iterate before publishing to the team.
Production-deployed on Hetzner with Docker Compose, handling real creative workflows daily.
What I Learned
Semantic search changes behavior. Once people can search by description, they stop organizing files into elaborate folder hierarchies. The AI handles what humans are bad at (consistent naming) and humans handle what AI is bad at (creative judgment).
Personal libraries aren't about ownership — they're about creative safety. The staging space exists because creatives fear judgment on unfinished work.