Is a VCS appropriate for usage by a designer?

Question

I know that a VCS is absolutely critical for a developer to increase productivity and protect the code, no doubts about it. But what about a designer, using say, Photoshop (though it's not specific to any tools, just to make my point clearer).

VCSs uses delta compression to store different versions of files. This works very well for code, but for images, that's a problem. Raster image files are binary formats, though vector image files are text (SVG comes to my mind) and pose to problem. The problem comes with .psd files (and any other image "source" file) - those can get pretty big and since I'm not familiar with the format, I'll consider them as binary files. How would a VCS work in this condition?

The repository could be pretty darned big if the VCS server isn't able to diff the files efficiently (or worse, not at all) and over time this can become a really big pain when someone needs to check out the repository (or clone it if using a DVCS).

Have any of you used a VCS for this purpose? How well does it work? I'm mostly interested in Mercurial, though this is a general situation that applies to any VCS.

Answer 1

Designers usually use specialized tools like AlienBrain, Adobe VersionCue or similar, which are essentically Version Control Systems that understand Images and other Media Assets, which allows stuff like diffing two images.

Designers IMHO should definitely use VCS systems, at least as a means for Versioning and backup - their stuff is just as important as Specs, Documentation, Code, Deploy Scripts and everything else that makes a project.

I do not know if there are bridges between "Asset Management Systems" like the mentioned ones and Developer VCS' systems though.