Toolkit · Media
DAM Photo Embed
Render a digital asset portal as native tiles, not an iframe.
The problem
Digital asset platforms give you an iframe with a fixed height that looks nothing like your site, or nothing at all. Journalists then can't find your press images, and you end up emailing zip files.
How it works
A scheduled job snapshots the portal structure into cached JSON and downloads each thumbnail. The embed renders native, auto-sizing tiles in your own styling, with a lightbox.
Worth knowing
This exists because of a specific failure mode worth knowing about: the vendor serves preview images through pre-signed URLs that expire, so hot-linking them makes your gallery return broken images intermittently and unpredictably. The job downloads and commits each thumbnail instead.
It also runs server-side, where the vendor's cross-origin block doesn't apply — a browser genuinely cannot do this. It's one of two tools here where a scheduled job exists purely to be a CORS proxy.
Using it at your organization
- Add your portal shortcode to a config file barely a hundred bytes long.
- Works with any Acquia DAM portal — it was written to be generic.
- Twenty-one data attributes control tile size, spacing and behaviour.
Stack: Node 18+ · GitHub Actions (6-hourly) · vanilla JS embed
Licence: MIT — use, modify and redistribute freely, commercially or not.
Hosting: static files; no server required.
Related tools
Built for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library and released for anyone to use. See all 19 tools, or read how the whole system is built.