Miljac

Thank you for your suggestion, AiDon. I did a quick check of Irfanview. I really like its fast responsiveness. But, here is what I don't like: - Irfanview does not support neither NEF nor NRW files (Nikon's RAW), at least not without plugins. I don't know if there are any suitable plugins to correct this. - I got too saturated colors on my wide gamut monitor. I suspect that Irfanview did not negotiate the correct color space with my monitor. I still haven't tried how it would behave if I switch the monitor to a standard sRGB. - I haven't found any feature similar to cataloging the images. I have 80K images downloaded in windows folders, one folder per date of creation. I have organized my photos relying on catalogs, albums, tagging, version sets, etc. I don't think that Irfanview can support all of this. IMO, these are the most important features of DAM's. I am also checking Adobe Bridge. So far I have succeeded to browse all my photos in a single window, independently of the folders, which proves that Bridge uses a kind of indexing table for handling the images. It looks promising for now and I am continuing to investigate. I hope that there is a way to migrate from Organizer's structure to Bridge without too much pain.

@fredreg At first I didn't like the proposal, but after a second reading, I realized that it indeed makes sense! If I understood correctly, you are proposing that newbies with small collections start with a basic Affinity DAM and grow with it, while the people already using any existing DAM, just continue using it until Affinity DAM achieves desired maturity level and at this point they migrate. Well, I would cope with such scenario, assuming that Affinity could ensure some kind of import from another DAM. (I'm now still using Adobe Elements Organizer on Windows with 80K images in its albums. I still don't have any Affinity product. I'm lacking a clear decision for Affinity just because I can't sort out the question of the DAM. If I go for LR, I'm getting also PS and then I don't have a reason to buy Affinity. If I stay with Organizer, I must purchase also the bundled Elements, which I don't like. I haven't found any third DAM which would serve my requirements.)

Affinity Photo can't be used for file management, so why use it for fetching your images from camera anyway? I am rather using Nikon Transfer (part of View NX-I) for transferring photos to a disk, Capture NX-D as a RAW converter and plan to use AP only for editing the TIFF's. (I'm on Windows.)

Good proposal, firstdefence. For me, 20-30 hours would me more than enough for a trial. With frequent releases and trial resets, someone may comfortably use it for free for a long, long time, so it's ok if Serif decides to limit it in days as well, but please not under let say 45 days.

I think that trial period for Affinity Photo needs to be longer. In a 10 days period I only found 3-4 hours to look into the software and for me it's far from enough to bring the decision for purchase. I only found that it's not fully compatible with Google NIK Collection (Viveza does not work properly), it does not have full screen preview, Elements Organizer does not recognize native Affinity format... On the the other hand, it looks like I can find a lot more usable controls over the Elements, such as HSL filter, which really made me happy! I just started familiarizing with Affinity masks, and wanted to finalize first image in Affinity Photo, when the trial expired ..... I have no other option but to wait for the next release and a reset of the trial .. I believe that I am not the only one who's too busy in daily routines to concentrate the trial scope in such a short period. (I don't like money back guarantee, as suggested by carl123. Normally I never come back to the seller where I had to use this.)

I am checking a trial version of Affinity Photo on Windows 7. I immediately realized that I am missing a full screen preview mode. Every now and then during the edit I am used to quickly switch to a full screen, so to preview my work and escape back to continue editing. In a full screen mode I would expect an easy option to quickly zoom to 100% and back, as well as to compare "before" and "after" images. I think that many Windows photo editors support this function, such as Capture NX-D, Photoshop, Elements ...

Hello, My nickname is Miljac. I am a photo amateur for many years, mainly dealing with the landscapes and travel photos. I was a faithful user of the Elements Photoshop & Organizer for a long time. But, I don't like the development direction of this suite any more and I have a feeling that now I want to try something more powerful. Further, I don't like the pricing model of the Adobe CC, so in a search for a worthy replacement - I am here! :-) I am still testing how could Affinity Photo fit into my current workflow.