title: I want to separate binary files (media) from my code repositories. Is it worth it? If so, how can I manage them?
body: <p>Our repositories are getting huge because there's tons of media we have ( hundreds of 1 MB jpegs, hundreds of PDFs, etc ).</p>
  
  <p>Our developers who check out these repositories have to wait an abnormally long time because of this for certain repos. </p>
  
  <p>Has anyone else had this dilemma before? Am I going about it the right way by separating code from media? Here are some issues/worries I had:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>If I migrate these into a media server then I'm afraid it might be a pain for the developer to use. Instead of making updates to one server he/she will have to now update two servers if they are doing both programming logic and media updates.</li>
  <li>If I migrate these into a media server, I'll still have to revision control the media, no? So the developer would have to commit code updates <em>and</em> commit media updates. </li>
  <li>How would the developer test locally? I could make my site use absolute urls, eg <code>src="http://media.domain.com/site/blah/image.gif"</code>, but this wouldn't work locally. I assume I'd have to change my site templating to decide whether it's local/development or production and based on that, change the BASE_URL. </li>
  <li>Is it worth all the trouble to do this? We deal with about 100-150 sites, not a dozen or so major sites and so we have around 100-150 repositories. We won't have the time or resources to change existing sites, and we can only implement this on brand new sites.</li>
  <li>I would still have to keep scripts that generate media ( pdf generators ) and the generated media on the code repository, right? It would be a huge pain to update all those pdf generators to POST files to external media servers, and an extra pain taking caching into account.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'd appreciate any insight into the questions I have regarding managing media and code.</p>