The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Version control for web/graphic design team?

Version control for web/graphic design team?

Hello,

We are a small team (6 people) of graphic designer and web programmer. I'm currently looking for a good file versioning solution for such a team. We work at home and do not have a high speed connection between our computers. (Cable modem is not considered high speed for 100mb+ graphic files) CVS is great for programming team but the hugh size of graphic files make it quite inconvenient to setup a centralized file repository. Any suggestions for good solution to handle versioning of graphic files?
Either software solution or just a methodology is welcome.

PS: We are close enough so burning the files on CDR and bringing it over is feasible.

Jack
Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Subversion handles binary files like CVS handles text files. That is, it does a binary diff. Compressed graphic files don't benefit from this much but it might be worth checking out.

Almost Anonymous
Wednesday, April 28, 2004

I think Adobe has something like this now, essentially team version control for graphic files - I think it has a bit of a bias towards Photoshop and other Adobe formats, but I think it would work for all assets. In a moment of kindness/work avoidance, I even found you the page.
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/versioncue.html

It's part of CreativeSuite.

Andrew Cherry
Wednesday, April 28, 2004

If you're working almost exclusively with binary (non-text) files, Subversion isn't the best choice right now. (This from a big fan of Subversion.) It doesn't do locking, and a team of designers isn't going to want to deal with binary diffs.

You're probably going to want a product that supports locking. SourceSafe will do this for you, and is essentially free, but using it is painful if you're not all on the same (relatively high speed) LAN.

I recommend checking out SourceGear's vault, though I've only used the free eval. It supports locking, it works well over slowish connections, it offers a simple SourceSafe-like interface, and it's reasonably priced.

Ian Olsen
Wednesday, April 28, 2004

http://www.alienbrain.com/

Captain Offshore
Wednesday, April 28, 2004