Hi there,
We are unsure whether we should store videos and photos in ECM or not? May I know how many community users are doing so if if there are any known issues with it e.g excessive storage, long retrieval time, is compression needed for large video files, etc??
Appreciate your feedback.
I have been storing video / photos on some customer systems, and I specifically have one customer whose primary business model revolves around using Alfresco to manage high-resolution (large) photos and videos for various of its customers (publishing industry). In terms of "excessive" storage, long retrieval time etc it completely depends on how much / what storage you are using, and in some degree on how you are working with versions (each version of the content may be a separate file on storage). There are also techniques to use caching of content for potentially slow storage devices so users have faster access e.g. if they already accessed a piece of content before. Compression is not guaranteed to bring much depending on the format of the media file, and can even contribute to long retrieval time especially for large media files.
One of my projects (simple-content-stores) provides some content store utilities that might help work with such a use case, e.g. transparent compressing and deduplication of content to save on storage.
In general I personally do not see a problem using Alfresco for large media files provided your system setup is properly adapted to the use case.
Thank you Axel. Its good to know that there are others that has already experienced with large video/photos and there is no major issues provided that its setup to manage them.
Axel, is this the normal response from community forum users as I only have your reply?? Is it a rather inactive forum? Otherwise, appreciate if you can point out where can i find more active participation wrt Alfresco Community users?
The forum is rather active, but there is a some discrepancy between people asking questions and those answering them. There are a hand full of people that regularly look for unanswered questions. Alfresco can help deal with very diverse use cases and not all users may have dealt with a particular use case themselves and thus may not answer. Also most of the people answering question will not do "me too"-style answers, so if there already is an answer to a question there will seldom be another answer unless the first was off the point.
The only Alfresco community that is more active than on this platform is the IRC channel.
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