footage.one
German digital asset management platform that indexes photos, videos and documents with a 60-million-term AI vocabulary and built-in face recognition, keeps files on your own storage, and ships a REST API and MCP server in every plan.
What is footage.one?
footage.one is a digital asset management (DAM) platform built and run by a small developer team in Bochum, in Germany's Ruhr region. It targets organisations that accumulate photos, videos and documents faster than they can catalogue them: production companies, agencies, media archives, tourism boards, estate agencies, clubs and independent creators.
Three things set it apart on its own pages. The first is the sheer size of its tagging vocabulary — more than 60 million terms, with automatic object and scene detection, synonyms, hierarchical terms and controlled vocabularies. The homepage and the comparison page put that vocabulary at more than twelve languages while the pricing table claims 120, a discrepancy the site never resolves. The second is face recognition, built in rather than sold as an extra: people are detected and grouped automatically across photos and videos. The third, and the one the publisher pushes hardest, is storage freedom. footage.one centralises metadata only, so the files themselves stay on whatever the customer already runs — S3-compatible object storage, a Synology or QNAP NAS, Nextcloud, WebDAV, Google Drive or local disks. That is how the company backs its claim of no vendor lock-in.
Around that core sit the usual DAM functions: projects, albums, collections, episodes and relations between assets; hash-based duplicate detection; secure share links and approvals; rights and licence management with an audit trail; an interactive map for GPS-tagged media; and automated distribution to shops, portals, content management systems and stock platforms, with format conversion along the way.
What is genuinely unusual here is the developer story. footage.one exposes a REST API discoverable through HATEOAS links from a single entry URL, documented with OpenAPI and a live Swagger interface, alongside a native Model Context Protocol server that gives AI agents tools for assets, albums, episodes, storage, keywords and teams. Claude Desktop, n8n, LangChain, OpenAI Custom GPTs, Zapier and Make all have setup guides. Crucially, the API and the MCP server are included in every plan, the free one included — the opposite of the enterprise DAM systems the company measures itself against. Hosting is in the EU, the publisher is German, and the full price list is public.
What it does
- Tag photos and videos automatically using an AI vocabulary of more than 60 million terms
- Detect and group people across the entire library with built-in face recognition
- Connect existing storage — S3, MinIO, Wasabi, WebDAV, Synology or QNAP NAS, Nextcloud, Google Drive — and leave the files where they are
- Query the media library in natural language from Claude Desktop, n8n, LangChain or a Custom GPT
- Distribute media automatically to shops, portals and platforms in the right formats and resolutions
- Spot duplicate files by hash, and visually similar images from the Professional plan upwards
- Manage usage rights, licences and granular access control with an audit trail
When to use footage.one / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if footage.one is the right fit.
When to use footage.one
- Film production companies and freelance filmmakers who need to find one specific shot in hours of rushes
- Agencies and marketing teams handling media for several clients, with clear separation between them
- Archives, museums, broadcasters and cultural institutions cataloguing large historical media collections
- Tourism boards, hotel groups and estate agencies managing destination content, property photos and drone footage
- Developers and AI teams who want a media library their agents can query through MCP or a documented REST API
When not to use footage.one
- Anyone looking for an editor: footage.one organises, finds and distributes media, it never cuts video or retouches photos
- Teams expecting a workable free tier, since the Free plan stops at 200 assets and leaves out AI tagging, image similarity, own storage and multi-user
- Small budgets that need collaboration from day one, because multi-user only comes bundled from the Professional plan
- People who work mainly from a phone or tablet, as there is no iOS or Android application
- Organisations whose legal team must read the contract in its own language, the imprint, terms and privacy policy being published in German only
How to use footage.one
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account on app.footage.one; the free plan starts straight away, with no sales call
- Follow the First upload guide to bring in an initial batch of photos or videos
- From the Starter plan upwards, connect your own storage: S3-compatible object storage through the AWS S3 or MinIO types, WebDAV, a NAS or Nextcloud
- Import existing storage items so footage.one indexes them without moving the files
- Let AI auto-tagging suggest keywords, then refine them with the keywording workflow, labels and controlled vocabularies
- Organise the library into projects, albums, collections and episodes, and link related assets together
- Set usage rights, licences and access levels before opening anything to a wider audience
- Share with external partners through secure share links, or configure an automated distribution channel
- Generate a personal API token from your account page and call the REST API with the apiKey header, or use OAuth2 with PKCE for third-party applications
- Add the MCP server URL to Claude Desktop, n8n or LangChain and sign in with your footage.one account — the MCP endpoint accepts OAuth only, not API tokens
Pros & Cons
Pros
- API and MCP server included in every plan, free tier included, where comparable systems gate them behind an enterprise contract
- Fully public pricing from zero to 499 euros a month, with no mandatory demo call
- No vendor lock-in: files stay on the customer's own storage and only the metadata is centralised
- German publisher, EU or EEA hosting written into the contract, and a separate data processing agreement on offer
- Face recognition and a 60-million-term tagging vocabulary at no extra charge
- Unusually open developer material: Swagger interface, HATEOAS root, API catalog, MCP server card, llms.txt and integration guides
- Direct contact with the people who build the product, and custom work available for connectors, on-premise, headless or white-label setups
Cons
- The free plan is narrower than it looks: 200 assets, and it excludes AI tagging, image similarity, own storage and multi-user
- Collaboration costs extra at Starter level — 49 euros a month for multi-user and 29 for external sharing — and is only bundled from Professional
- AI auto-tagging is metered in minutes per month on every plan except Enterprise
- No iOS or Android application, and the interface exists only in German, English and Polish
- Imprint, terms and privacy policy are published in German only; the English URLs serve the same German text
- No trust centre, no status page, no security page and no subprocessor list, and the hosting provider is never named
- The MCP endpoint accepts OAuth only, so API tokens do not work there yet and headless integrations are blocked
Pricing & Plans
footage.one publishes its price list in full. A permanent free plan is available, limited to 200 assets, one hour of video and 5 GB of storage. The cheapest paid tier is Starter at 49.00 EUR per month; Professional costs 199.00 EUR and Enterprise 499.00 EUR per month. All prices are net of VAT, and annual billing carries a 17 % discount. Add-ons and extra quotas are priced separately: multi-user at 49 EUR per month, external sharing at 29 EUR, an additional distribution channel at 29 EUR, the public search widget at 49 EUR, extra storage at 15 EUR per terabyte per month, and extra video hours from 19 EUR for 50 hours.
- 200 assets
- 1 hour of video
- 5 GB of storage
- 1 user
- the 60M+ term vocabulary and duplicate detection
- AI auto-tagging
- image similarity
- own storage and multi-user are not included
- unlimited photos and documents
- 50 hours of video
- 250 GB
- 1 user
- 50 minutes of AI auto-tagging per month
- own storage (S3
- WebDAV and the like) and distribution
- multi-user and sharing available as paid add-ons
- unlimited photos and documents
- 500 hours of video
- 2 TB
- one team with unlimited users
- 300 minutes of AI auto-tagging per month
- image similarity
- sharing
- access control
- unlimited photos and documents
- 2
- 500 hours of video
- 10 TB
- multiple teams with unlimited users
- unlimited AI auto-tagging
- multiple distribution channels
- priority support with SLA and custom integrations
- Team / Multi-User 49 EUR
- Shares and sharing 29 EUR
- Distribution Channel 29 EUR
- Public Search Widget 49 EUR
- storage at 15 EUR per TB per month
- video hours at 19 EUR for 50 h
- 29 EUR for 100 h
- 49 EUR for 200 h and 99 EUR for 500 h
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how footage.one handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is claimed explicitly and backed by concrete mentions. The privacy policy names the controller in full — footage.one UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Nevelstr. 32, 44795 Bochum, Germany — with a telephone number and the address info@footage.one. The terms cast footage.one as an Article 28 processor, restrict the data centre to the European Union or the European Economic Area, and provide for a separate data processing agreement. The privacy policy sets out the full range of data-subject rights, names PostHog and Google Ireland as third parties used on the website, and documents consent management. Two gaps deserve mention: no data protection officer is designated, and no hosting provider is ever named. An Article 27 representative is not required, the publisher being established in Germany.
Who owns the data?
The terms of service, in their January 2025 edition, are unambiguous: data the customer enters and anything generated from it belongs exclusively to the customer, and footage.one treats it as confidential. Where that data is personal, footage.one acts as a processor under Article 28 GDPR, working only on the customer's instructions and only to deliver the service, while the customer stays accountable for the lawfulness of the processing. The publisher may appoint only a data centre run by a hoster established in the EU or EEA, and the details are settled in a separate processing agreement. Connect your own storage and the original files never leave it: footage.one holds the metadata, not the media.
Reuse rights
Customers keep full reuse rights over their own material. The terms assign customer data exclusively to the customer, and footage.one may process it only to run the service and only on the customer's instructions; no clause claims a licence over customer media for the publisher's own purposes. Nothing anywhere on the site — terms, privacy policy or documentation — mentions using customer data to train AI models. Export functions are available throughout the contract, and connecting your own S3, WebDAV or NAS storage keeps the original files inside your own infrastructure. One reservation: footage.one does reserve the right to name customers as references for marketing and sales purposes.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
footage.one says it is built in Germany and hosted in the EU, and that customer data does not leave the Union. The terms are more precise and more limited: the publisher may only use a data centre run by a hoster established in the European Union or the European Economic Area. No hosting provider is ever named and no specific country is given for the platform itself. Where customers connect their own storage — S3-compatible object storage, a NAS, Nextcloud, WebDAV or local disks — the original files never reach footage.one at all and only the metadata is centralised. A documentation page recommends European storage providers that customers may subscribe to and warns that a US company remains subject to the CLOUD Act even with a European data centre, but those are suggestions for the customer rather than footage.one's own subprocessors. On the marketing site, PostHog stores analytics on an EU server and Google Maps may process data on US servers. The domain resolves to a Cloudflare anycast address geolocated in the United States, which is a CDN edge node and not where data lives.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting footage.one.
- Face recognition applied to identifiable people is high-risk processing under the GDPR, and the obligation falls on you as controller whatever the publisher's own compliance posture
- The Free plan card lists AI tagging, image similarity, own storage and multi-user with a strike-through that is easy to miss on screen; none of them are actually included
- The 400 EUR figure on the homepage is what the publisher says comparable enterprise systems cost, not a footage.one price
- AI auto-tagging is capped in minutes per month outside Enterprise, so a large ingest can quietly exhaust the quota
- Google Maps loads on some platform pages and can send your IP address and location data to Google, including to servers in the United States
- The contract renews automatically for the same term with only seven days' notice to cancel, and the publisher reserves the right to name you as a marketing reference
- A single mailbox handles general contact, legal and data protection requests; there is no designated data protection officer and no dedicated support address
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low for basic use, moderate as soon as you leave the defaults. Signing up and uploading a first batch needs no technical skill, and the free plan starts without a sales call. Connecting your own storage is where it gets harder — S3 keys, an exposed NAS share or a WebDAV endpoint — though dedicated guides cover Synology, QNAP and Nextcloud. The REST API is approachable, discoverable from one URL with a live Swagger interface. The awkward point is the MCP endpoint, which accepts OAuth with a browser login only, so headless integrations are not possible there yet.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind footage.one
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement footage.one.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is footage.one?
Is there a free plan, and what does it actually include?
How much does the cheapest paid plan cost?
Can I keep my files on my own storage?
Where is my data hosted?
Does footage.one have an API?
Which AI tools can I connect to it?
What happens to my data if I cancel?
Is a data processing agreement available?
Which languages does the interface support?
Should you pick footage.one?
footage.one is what happens when a small, opinionated development team builds a DAM instead of a sales funnel. Almost every decision on the site points the same way: the price list is public down to the add-ons, the API and the MCP server sit in the free plan rather than behind an enterprise gate, and the storage model is designed so the publisher never holds your files in the first place. For a production company, an agency or an archive that already runs a NAS or an S3 bucket, that combination is unusual and genuinely valuable — the metadata gets centralised, the media does not move, and an AI agent can search the whole library through a documented interface.
The reservations are equally concrete. The free plan reads better than it is: four of the lines on its card are struck through, and they happen to be the four that matter — AI tagging, image similarity, own storage and multi-user. At Starter level, working as a team is a paid add-on rather than a feature. There is no mobile app, and the imprint, terms and privacy policy exist only in German, which will slow down any legal review outside a German-speaking company. On the trust side, the publisher commits contractually to EU or EEA hosting but never names its hoster, publishes no subprocessor list and runs no trust centre or status page — modest by the standards of larger vendors, though the contract itself is clear about ownership and deletion.
In short: a credible, technically open European alternative to the big DAM suites, best suited to teams that value data sovereignty and API access over polish and breadth of support. Read the pricing table line by line before committing, and budget for the add-ons.
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