KC Honie

They will do what Capture One did and create a de facto subscription model. C1 made perpetual so expensive and customer hostile that most new purchases are subscriptions. You can bet Canva will do the same thing... Subscription models are here to stay and perpetual models are on life support. SW Developers cannot survive on a perpetual licensing model.

@chills I don't have to look at the Canva thread, the economics of software development no longer support perpetual models (just look at the s%*t storm that ensued when Capture One moved to a de facto subscription model, with significant price increases, and they didn't back down). Canva will indeed do the same thing, a very onerous perpetual license and a de facto subscription model They will NEVER take a even a small bite from Adobe, Adobe is the standard and there is no way a small player will impact Adobe. The sales that Affinity took from Adobe fall in to the category of de minimis. There is no incentive to do a DAM, they will do a raw developer with a catalog long before they do a DAM. They do not have the bandwidth to support the hundreds of file formats required for a DAM...

Just an observation... We are discussing work arounds for a problem that has existed for years with respect to Affinity products. There are elegant integrated solutions with other providers. I think we need to understand that several things are going to happen, 1) a DAM will NOT be forthcoming, and 2) based on Canva's recent price excursions we can expect Affinity products to move to subscription and the price to dramatically increase. So one has to ask one's self "what is the point of continuing to support Serif/Canva?

Canva Jacks Up Some Subscription Prices by 300% Ahead of Expected IPO Who didn't see that coming, hahahahahaha https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24234698/canva-price-increase-300-percent-ai-features Adobe wins without even lifting a finger...

The quote was in the same thread and it was directed at me when I pushed them on release date, plus I get notifications when there are new posts. It is all for sport now… I just hate to see software vendors make irreparable strategic decisions…

They actually stated in these forums that a DAM had been considered but was off the table… Serif’s words and actions seem pretty clear… For me it doesn’t matter, I am now invested in other tools…

While this is an interesting discussion, Serif/Canva has no interest in providing the needed tools to take their products to the next level…

Sorry I use AP to mean Affinity Photo…

John, I think that you have misconstrued what people are asking for, there needs to be a DAM that not only works across the Affinity/Canva apps but also catalogues a wide variety of digital assets. Then there either needs to be a LR competitor or a catalog function needs to be added to AP similar to LRs catalog…

Cloud based storage is a complete non starter… Your images are ripe to be used to train AI, stolen, or lost… Robust local storage is really the only option… But backup, backup, backup!!!

Early on in V1, on this forum they announced that they were working on a DAM. They then walked that back and later said there would be no DAM. My workflow requires an integrated DAM (not the work around that I have been using). Adobe is my solution. As I have mentioned before, Photoshop is so far ahead of AP there is no way that I would go back to AP. Plus over the last year I have created thousands of assets in both LR and PS. I will not endure the pain associated with moving back to Affinity apps…

Unfortunately it is abundantly clear that they are nit going to create a dam… If you need one then we must seek solutions elsewhere…

@Chills For me and I suspect for many others it is too late with regards to Affinity products. I transitioned my digital assets back to adobe from both affinity and capture one… I am quite pleased and would not do a transition back to affinity if they were to release a dam…

These are the primary reasons why I went back to Lightroom and Photoshop. They both use Camera Raw and the round trip between them is trivial... What shocked me when I made my way back to Adobe (which I hated to do) is how much more capable Photoshop is than Affinity Photo. Even without Affinity Develop (a light room competitor), it is completely absurd that a graphic suite that is being used by a significant number of graphic design professionals doesn't have an DAM.

That is possible, the LR features are already there, strip everything out of AP except develop and wrap a DAM around it and you are there, fairly trivial to do. The more difficult task is to create a DAM that wraps around all three apps with tight integration plus adds the catalog function to AP... Around V1.1 they said they were getting close to beta for their version of a DAM. I use Neofinder as a reasonable DAM but it does nothing for me like LR does and C1P did (poorly). I just have way too many digital assets to continue to use the OS file system to find and launch specific assets.