There are a LOT of softwares out there whose focus is photo editing, including Affinity. However, there are very few that I have found that focus on what I consider to be one of the most important aspects of photography: photo management (on Mac systems). And - of those, none has hit a home run like the original iPhoto and Aperture.I would be thrilled if only Affinity could make something that simply offered what iPhotos did back in 2015. Or even better - Aperture. When Apple dumped their support for those two programs and switched to Photos, I quit using their DAM software. It was terribly frustrating, because all of the wonderful features in iPhoto and Aperture were discarded for a much clunkier interface that didn’t come close to the beautiful integration of their older software.I have searched for six years for a better alternative, and come up with nothing that really satisfies. Affinity has done such a great job in the Photo, Designer and Publisher categories that I am hoping you turn your sights on DAM. I have used ACDSee, which comes close, but there are features they lack - particularly facial recognition. They have told me for the last 3 years they're working on it, but still haven’t managed to add that to their Mac version. Here are some suggestions that I think you have to have in order to become the number one software after Lightroom: (Heck, I'd love to see you beat Lightroom) 1. FACES - The number one feature I believe people who buy DAM software are going to want is FACIAL RECOGNITION. This feature is SO helpful, and if I am going to organize my photos, that is fantastic. I can create albums for each of my kids easily with this, and it is the first thing I look for. (Unfortunately, only Apple’s Photos offers this in the free/reasonably priced side or Adobe’s Light Room on the other hand if you like subscription. Which many people hate, including myself). 2. KEY WORDS - Many DAMs are offering automatic key word algorithms. This is really nice, so I don’t have to individually tell the program that ‘X’ picture has a dog or flower in it, it automatically tags photos for me. This is awesome. The new Photos does this. 3. SLIDE SHOWS - Automatically creating slide shows, adding music and being able to play for people is another must-have part of any good DAM. Being able to also edit and export said shows is even better. Photos does this as well as Adobe, but not the others that I know of.4. LOCATIONS - Places is probably important as well, being able to import meta data from the photos (or add it if they don’t have any), and seeing a map of where the pictures were taken. 5. INTERFACE: This is where I believe Apple fails big time. As I mentioned, their old iPhotos made everything easy - finding faces would pop on 12 or more at a time and you could easily verify whether a suggested face is the right person. Now in Photos, you have to do it one at a time and it is very time consuming and clunky - the navigation gives you so few options. Another issue would be being able to view photos with various options - dark screen, one at a time, or multiple images, being able to compare two side by side, (plus having smaller thumbnails of other photos below) and having the equivalent of a loupe to zoom in real close would be great. Aperture was the best at this - you had a lot of options to choose from. I really miss that software. Also - being able to manage the software without ingesting it into the program seems to be the best way. Keeping gigabytes of photos in the places I have them organized is easier than importing into a whole new software - let along the redundancy and hard drive space. 6. SHARING & PRINTING - One thing I always loved about iPhotos and Aperture was the ability to create calendars, books, cards and other items right in the interface. Then I could order those books and calendars straight from Apple. That was awesome. Their quality was always high and I had a lot of options. Now with Photos, they do still allow it, but you order from a 3rd party and the interface is nowhere near as easy. This is another way Affinity could expand it’s marketplace with ongoing sales of other products. Also being able to post photos directly to social media is probably something many people will want. 7. LIGHT EDITING - One thing I’ve noticed about many of these softwares is that they load up with all kinds of tools to tweak and edit the photos. I have Affinity Photos and Photoshop for that - I don’t really need my DAM software to do the same thing. However, I expect you will sell a lot more of the software if you included enough EASY features that non-pros will be happy. And of course, non-destructive editing makes more people happy.I hope you can give this some serious consideration to adding a DAM to your line-up. I think there is room to become THE main alternatives to Adobe in this field.Sincerely,Rick Garside
