What strategies are best for storing art assets in SVN?

Question

We use SVN very successfully for source code in the traditional way: / branch, / trunk and / tags.

We do not use SVN for our artistic assets, which are somewhat similar to the source, but actually do not have the same needs as the source code.

I am referring not only to image files (jpeg, png, etc.), but also PhotoShop files and stock images that were purchased (and should not be lost).

What would be the best practice for file structure and procedure for my graphs?

Answer 1

This is a good question. I wonder how other people do it.

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What I usually do is keep track of the main PSD files in the SVN repository in a separate folder. Say you have / images containing all of your images. In this case, I usually configure / images / source containing the latest PSD files.

This is a little annoying to the first checkout, but PSDs are not updated as often as the source code, so it's not so bad.

Of course, you should exclude these folders when deploying your website.

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Another way my company handles this is all on a network hard drive. We track changes in the file structure as follows:

/Project/Assets/Design/ / Round 1 / Round 2 / Round n 

The Round folder indicates the version of the PSD files and the associated JPG export. This is more effective if you have too many rounds of changes, because if you have 100 versions, it becomes difficult to manage correctly.

Answer 2

For our graphics, we organize things in projects (for example, / graphics / marketing / NAILBA / 2009 / Banner is our banner for the NAILBA {life insurance} conference this year). Folders / connecting line and / branch are optional, but they offer a clean way to explore ideas before choosing one version. Since HEAD is usually the only version that matters, we do not use / tags. Now we do not create so much content (we primarily program a set of web applications), but this has had a good effect on our marketing projects (flyers, banners, websites, etc.).