The WordPress media manager has become so good over the years it can be used as a solid media asset manager to centralize many of your media assets too.

Benefits: 

• COST: Why pay for an expensive DAM system if your needs are that complicated and WP can handle it.
• BRAND CUSTOMIZABILITY: You can host a WordPress install on your domain at something like media.yourdomain.com and if you’re sending links to clients this helps you stay on your brand all the time.
• CUSTOMIZABILITY #2: If you need something else, there is probably already a plugin for it. I use the built in image resizing filter to create a number of custom sizes automatically on upload and I imagine this sort of thing could be really useful for photographers too.

Recommendations: 

• ADD TAGS: Being able to tag images or videos so you can associate them with various projects is critical. WP doesn’t do this well by default. Fortunately, there are plugins that can add custom taxonomies to the media library to allow you to do this, among other things. We’ve been using Enhanded Media Library for this and it works well.
• CHANGE UPLOAD DIRECTORY: By default if you want send a file around to a client or colleague your domain will look like  http://www.youdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.jpg. If you are on a multisite it gets worse: http://www.youdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/792/filename.jpg. If you have the ability to do this, it might make sense to change your upload directory. I wrote another post on how to do this here. The resultant links can be made to look more like: www.yourdomain.com/media/filename.jpg. Or you could use a subdomain like images.yourdomain.com/assets/filename.jpg. Clean! Nice!