The thinking
The real cost of scattered assets
The asset always exists — that's what makes scattered media so maddening. You made the testimonial clip, you exported the carousel, you shot the b-roll. But it lives in a folder named "Final_v3_REAL" on a laptop, or in a Slack thread, or in a download you can't re-find, so you remake it. The work was never the problem; locating it was.
The asset you need almost always exists. The only question is whether you can find it before you give up and remake it.
A library fixes the locating, and it fixes something the folders never could: it knows what happened to each file afterwards. Every asset carries the number of posts that used it and the date it last went out, because those are recorded as posts publish rather than typed in by hand.
That turns a storage problem into a content problem. Instead of "where is that clip," the useful question becomes "what have I got that I've never posted" — and the library can answer it.
