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Now we have Photo, Designer and Publisher, will Affinity resume development of a full blown Digital Asset Manager? By full blown, I mean something is at least as useful as Media Pro was. One that can manage many files types, such as pdf and txt documents.

I haven't posted much here for a while as the current MAS version meets my editing needs quite nicely - thanks to all for your great work. However, it seems like a lifetime ago that we were assured that a DAM was coming. Is this still the case or has it been dropped?

So over the past few weeks I downloaded and test drove skylum's Luminar 3 ... and it was terrible. Slow (operations taking longer than 5 minutes), unresponsive, missing components ... it was really really bad. I remember reading that Serif is in the works of making the often requested DAM. I'm so glad they have made the decision to go this route. I think it would be a good time to start a new category in the forums specifically for this. Then move all appropriate threads into this area. Suggestions for Affinity (name here) I remember there being a poll about If the product should be made and what it should do. Personally, i'm interested in something that can compete with Capture One, outperform lightroom, and be reasonably priced.

My username: Yes, I am an Adobe Certified Expert. This shows how enthusiastic I used to be about Adobe and its products. That's gone now, and I want to contribute to the Affinity series with the same enthusiasm that I put into Adobe products before. I have a big desire: I want Affinity to be a complement to the Lightroom product family. As a professional photographer, I work regularly with Lightroom because it allows me to effectively manage my images. But unfortunately this program cannot be integrated into an affinity workflow. So it's not really usable anymore. But I need a way to manage 500,000 images in an integrated production process. It's also a very good thing for Serif to show Adobe how to do it right. With the new Lightroom CC, Adobe has gone astray - the tool is completely unusable. What do professionals need? Quicker access to the images. Clean and fast indexing. Print function with exact image dimensions. GPS allocation and Exif analysis for filtering. Picture evaluations. and absolutely: Multi user support. What is rarely or never needed: Photo book creation. Websites. When designing the Lightroom database, Adobe probably had the lonely photo Wolf in mind, who takes pictures alone and also edits his pictures alone. In my experience it's only seldom like this. Usually there are small teams of 2-6 people who photograph a session together and then want to work on it together. But this is not possible in Lightroom and never will be. Dear Community. Please support my wish and tell me what functions you still want from Serif when a clone is developed into Lightroom. I am German, unfortunately my English is not very good. I hope my message is understandable.

Could you please add a DAM to Affinity Photo? Or at least develop a program similar to Lightroom or Aperture? If your looking for ideas please look at Apertures filing system. I have found it to be the most robust filing system as far as flexibility for storing images and sorting images. There are many neat features on it and I found it a lot more user friendly than Lightroom. It's editing capabilities are outdated, but it's DAM features are second to none. Sincerely JT

Affinity Photo 1.7 beta completely replaced my Photoshop needs. I would like to have a Digital Asset Management software like Lightroom from Affinity. This will enable culling and then taking them to Affinity Photo for more detailed work. So how to do image management until we get another gem from Affinity? Nikon View NX-i does the job for basic image management. View NXi + Affinity Photo is a true replacement of subscription based Adobe Photography CC plan. Right Click The Image you want to take to Affinity Photo. Register If you have not registered before. Another way to take your image to Affinity Photo.

Just wondering is there a photo organizing software on the table that can replace Lightroom yes or no. If yes how long if no whynot

It would be nice if you release a codec so we can preview the .afphoto files in the operating system. Maybe you can take this a step further and release this for developers so they can include it in the DAM systems. I would love if someday I can preview the .afphoto files in Capture One

I have recently started to clean-up my photo directories by using Photo Supreme DAM software. However, I have a lot of afphoto files that I'm not quite sure a smart way of categorizing/tagging. My initial thought was to store the afphoto files in the same collection as the RAW files. How do y'all categorize/tag .afphoto files in your DAM software?

Hi all, I found out something rather interesting today Adobe Bridge is free. There is a catch unless you have opened a raw file in photoshop it will not let you edit in its own built in copy of adobe camera raw. But it does give you access to keywording collections and the asset management that tends to be missing in alternatives to adobe products. That and "open in" and right near the top of that list i find Affinity Photo and also Adobes DNG converter. It's not lightroom with its catalog but its not bad pretty much all the library functions are implemented. I've been using an old version of lightroom for asset management. i'm pretty sure that Bridge makes a good free alternative to manage photos with affinity photo doing the image processing. download it and have a play.

With Aperture dying and with Lightroom now being rental software only (I will not even get into the hot mess that Apple's Photos is), I was wondering whether there are any plans to implement image management into Affinity photos. That would be great! Lars

As Adobe has decided to make the import screen in Lightroom suitable for Instagram users, I have concerns wether Lightroom should be replaced in the future. Adobe makes this concerns even bigger by publishing buggy apps too early which ruin lives of professionals. Last year, Serif came out with this Affinity-suite and I have high hopes that they will release a Lightroom alternative. I am serious about that, since Capture One, well, does not work for me. But if you do, make sure that people can transfer 100k photos with any adjustments non-destructively. I don't know if you have plans for this, or if you have resources for this. But if you have, well, I would be the first to buy. Adobe is going for Instagram users with all their iOS-photoshop-mix-fix crap, which is not what professionals want. I know that one day, I will enjoy Affinity Designer on my iPad without compromises. And I hope you guys could rescue the professional photography business. I know this post has not the right spot in the forum, since everything is about Designer or Photo. But I just want to post this to see wether this could be the future of photography. Any name suggestions for a Lightroom alternative?

I have been searching endless, and in vain, to find the perfect Digital Asset Management solution. I am a massive fan of Serif products and have been from way before Affinity, but I am in desperate need of this promised product. In addition to already existing great products (PhotoMechanic for speed of ingesting files, Clarifai for auto tagging, Photos / Apeture (though discontinued) for Asset organisation, etc) there are some other features I would hope for create stacks of images - each stack to have a right click function of 'create focus merge, create HDR merge, create panorama' straight into Affinity Photo Auto tagging / keywords. this has come a long way in recent years and would save SOOO much time - i would also be willing to pay a SMALL monthly subscription for such a service. Structured keywords - with ready made structures And should Serif be short on Beta testers - pick me (please)

Is the affinity team check the Internet to see what are saying about your softwares ? Because if you conduct the investigation, you would see taht the most wanted feature is a DAM. Everywhere in Facebook groups, forums ... it's THE thing that blocks systematically. This is understandable, amateur photographers as professionals use sensibly same workflow that begins with the classification and organization of their photos... it's impossible for a photographer to do without a DAM when he has thousands of photos. Currently no DAM software seems to be able to read Affinity files ... If you really want to explode the market, take out THE PROMISED DAM for years or make an agreement with other software like DarkTable ... You will shadow Adobe only when you'll have a LightRoom equivalent (the dam part of course), in the meantime, photographers monitor, test but do not seriously consider using your software, many will also forget you... I really think that's DAM should be a priority, what about you ?

First of all: This is my first post, so Hello to all of you. I'm neither a pro designer nor a pro photographer. I'm a software developer that likes good design and that owns a DSLR. Serif’s tools Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo ended my search for good tools in their respective field. Whenever I have to draw an icon, I do so in Affinity Designer. If I need to do compositions, I do so in Affinity Photo. I love well designed things because it is my strong believe that these things make the lifes of the users easier. And better. If it is in the Affinity price range, I will buy Affinity Publisher, not only to support Serif’s great work but als because I'm sure it will fullfill my needs for designing documents. Initially, I collected the thoughts in this post to send them to Serif by mail but then I found that this Forum would be the better place to post it. It is an open secret that Serif also looked into the field of digital asset management. Apple having pulled the plug on Aperture, Adobe having killed the boxed version of Lightroom, I sense there is a void that many people want to be filled. I have high hopes in Serif’s solution. For me, a Lightroom and Aperture successor has to combine two important functions: Management of files on disk Non-destructive image manipulation function I hope that Serif’s solution will cover both: Editing as required by photographers (stripped down to their needs, not a complete Affinty Photo clone) combined with powerful metadata management. In this post, I'll focus on one specific part of metadata management: Faces. Lightroom’s faces support is alien. Faces are a kind of special keywords, but they are no real metadata class. Aperture was better in that it handled faces as a metadata class on its own. Still both tools did not get it right (in my opinion). Do you want to mark faces in images? I don’t. I want to mark people in the picture. Having a neural network that finds faces is a good start but it does not solve my requirement. Imagine you took pictures of a wedding. One of the picture is the bride walking down the aisle. We see her from behind. Her in a white dress, buttons perfectly lined up from the neck down. Flowers in the background. If you are thinking “faces”, you would not mark her in that image. Wouldn't you want to mark her? I surely would. So, here are a few things you might want to consider when implementing a “faces” metadata handling: You need to have a great import from Lightroom. This includes import of faces. The Aperture importer that Lightroom has is terrible, it does not know about faces, it simply imports them as keywords, loosing all position information. I wrote my own importer but I would prefer not to have to do that again for my next DAM. It's not about faces. It's about people. For some this might include animals. Think about someone that does tons of riding competitions. These people like to keep track of the horses, too. “People” might not be a perfect name but it is better than “faces”. Make your AI work on people, not faces. I know it's hard but todays machine learning knows to detect arms, legs, etc. Use that information. Stress the I in AI. Your AI detected my daughter with 95% confidence? Your AI sees a 51% similarity between the boy next to her and one of my colleages I have 5 images of but only 49% similarity with my son that is in 4000 pictures my daughter is in, too? It doesn't take too much intelligence to decide that the 51%-colleague should be 99%-son. Don’t handle images separately, use information gained from other images: Which persons tend to be in one image? There are lots of simple rules you could follow: One possible matching person has been confirmed in a picture taken a few minutes before or after? Guess who's this boy in the red sweater, who's the girl in the pink dress, I confirmed in 50 other pictures? If you detect the left arm with the same sweater in the picture taken a minute before, it is quite licely that it is the same person. Use the location data of images: 50% of all pictures of this person are within 100m of this picture's location - it's more likely that it is her than the other person you never took a picture of within 100km around that position. How likely is it that the same person is in one picture twice? Let aside framed pictures in the background and mirrors, if I label a person, use this information to reevaluate the confidence score of all other persons detected in the same image. If I have to add a person manually, don’t make me drag a rectangle around the face. Just let me click the person/face, then rerun your person detection AI with that information. If your AI was 30% confident there is a face and it gets told it is 100% a person, why not use the size information the AI had? Worst case? The rectangle is too big/small and I will have to resize it. 99% case: One click, person is detected correctly. Don’t make it a rectangle. Detect the outline. (See this paper - especially figure 5a/c) Let me repeat: Don't limit it to faces. People do not always look into the camera. I do tag pictures where you only see a hand or foot of a person. (Think about martial arts: Just a foot breaking a stone. I want to label that foot because I care who mastered it.) It's people, not keywords. Marking a person means that this person is visible in the image. Attaching a keyword means that this image is related to the keyword. (I tag all images that are related to one of my children with a keyword of their name. This will make it easy to export all images they might want to take when they move out. On the other hand, I want to have a simple way to search for images one of the children can be seen in.) So far for my thoughts on faces/people. I know I'm not the photo pro that uses Lightroom to make a living but given the price tags your other applications had, I guess lots of hobby or family shooters are looking in your direction right now. Bye, Daniel PS: Regarding the Lightroom import: Please do import the edits, too. I know it is not possible to match it 100% but 90% (or 75%) would be enough for my needs.

When it comes to organizing images in a DAM app can you please have a look at how Apples aperture organized them. They had Project, Album and Smart Albums. Then you could organize any of those items into folders. Also they allow a broad ranging choice of how to store the images, from within aperture library, an external folder on the HD or on an external HD, the options were limitless as well as automatically backing up the original images to a separate folder/drive. With work I will have multiple projects running dealing with between 2000 and 10000 images, Apertures organizing system made it a piece of cake to organize and categorize the images quickly and effectively so when it came time to make a movie out of the photos I did not need to pour through thousands of images as they were already organized in a way I could pull up the ones I needed straight away. I found lightrooms organizing system cumbersome and I had to go back and for between different projects (libraries), I want to see all my projects on the same screen as I tend to go back and forth between them quickly to compare. Can you also add editing capabilities for the basic edits like lightroom and aperture have and then link the photos into the Photo app for more advanced edits. For me aperture is the best DAM I have used and it is what made lightroom what it is today, it's a shame Apple discontinued it, but if you guys took on some of the organizing features that would be fantastic. Cheers JT

Does AffinityPhoto have a Digital Asset Manager similar to Lightroom, or even like Adobe Bridge in Photoshop 6, and if not is there any plan for one now that Lightroom is going down the rental path along with Photoshop?

Just purchased the photo software and love it. Need some style of digital asset management software.

I would like to see a Digital Asset Manager similar to Lightroom, or even as simple as Adobe Bridge from Photoshop 6 added to AffinityPhoto, particularly now that Lightroom is going down the same rental path as Photoshop. I am at a bit of a loss as to how I would process an uploaded SD card's worth of images in Photoshop without using Bridge. This is all that's keeping me from migrating entirely out of PS and into AffinityPhoto, which I bought when it first came out.

I'm making a concerted effort to shift from LR/Photoshop CC to Affinity. Not only do I have the Affinity Photo desktop but now the iPad version too. One issue remains: how to handle my 80,000 images that are catalogued in LR? Once I cancel my Adobe CC subscription, I'll have 80,000 stray images? The Lyn app is okay, but not enough. Very much would appreciate other ideas. Thank you.

I would like to see Affinity make a photo manager to replace Lightroom. That would be awesome!

Hello Support-Team, I shoot my pictures only in RAW (~3000/year). I know that Affinity Photo isn't a Raw converter like Lightroom, Capture one or On1. Currently I use Capture One Express for my Sony RAWs and Canon Digital Professional for my Canon RAWs to develop them. I am looking for an application that will be able to convert every RAW format and I heard that Serif is working on a seperate app for RAW conversion. I am sure this will get a great app like AP, too and I don't want to decide for a wrong other app. Is there a plan when such an app will come by Serif? Best regards, Juergen

I am currently using Lightroom which I will drop it once the Affinity DAM is available. Is there anything I should be doing now to prepare for the change once Affinity DAM is available? My current workflow is: copy my SD card to my desktop select photos copy photos to a folder on my iMac using this folder structure for example: Pictures > Lightroom Photos > 2016 > 2016-03_description_of_event > filename.jpg (2016-03 indicates the year 2016 and the month of March. Filename.jpg is the camera generated filename. Sometimes the file is a .jpg other times it is a (panasonic) .rw2 file. assign Lightroom keywords when importing into Lightroom delete the photos I don't like and eliminate them from Lightroom and move the original image to the trash. tweak the files I like, keeping them in Lightroom export .jpg files only when I need to upload them to my blog or when I want to post them to Facebook or instagra, make a print etc. My concern is that when I switch to Affinity DAM I will lose my keywording. Also I will not be able to access the finished image since it is stored in LR. I guess I should have been exporting .tiff files of my favorite photos but hesitated to do so since .tiff files are huge. Do you have any suggestions on how I should improve my Lightroom workflow now to prepare for the change to Affinity DAM in the future?

I was very excited to read that Serif is going to develop an Affinity Digital Asset Manager. As an Aperture user who cannot find any suitable replacement, I am hopeful that the quality and attention to detail which the Affinity products are known for will lead to an excellent option to migrate to. Given that I presume the DAM is in early stage development, I thought it might be worth putting down some features that are important to me in the hopes that they will be considered for inclusion. In particular, Aperture (and my need for a DAM) is a key part of the process of selecting/rejecting my photos, not just organising them. This is an area where other DAMs I have tried are woefully inadequate. So in that spirit, here are features I'd like to see in an Affinity DAM, two of which are vital to my workflow (and the reason nothing out there is currently a suitable Aperture replacement): 1) Support for RAW+JPEG pairs, so that the pairs can be operated on and tagged as if they are one file, but also with the option to switch between them (in Aperture, 'Use RAW as Original' or 'Use JPEG as Original'). I don't know why RAW+JPEG support is entirely absent or functions badly in everything I've tried. 2) Aperture has an amazing compare feature making it possible to bring up two photos side by side, cycle through the one on the right and reject ones not wanted, and quickly set the photo on the right as the new 'Compare Item' on the left. As well as being able to set the star rating or rejection of the photo on the right, it is also possible to reject the 'Compare Item' on the left, set the photo on the right as the new 'Compare Item', and continue cycling through the next set of photos. All of this can be controlled from the keyboard, making it very fast to cycle through similar photos and get down to one or two picks. Whilst doing this, one can also zoom and use the loupe (again from the keyboard), and it's possible to scroll through the two zoomed photos in sync by holding down the shift key. Taken together, this results in an amazing way to quickly go through dozens of photos, make detailed comparisons, and narrow down to just a few. I honestly don't know what I'll do if I can't find something that allows such a quick and powerful selection workflow before Aperture stops working! 3) AppleScript support so it's possible to tie other tools in (such as a custom Geotagging tool I've created). 4) Support for hierarchical keywords. 5) The Stacks feature of Aperture is extremely useful in grouping together multiple versions of a photo.Of these (1) and (2) are absolutely integral to managing my photos. I could probably work around the lack of (3) and (4), though longer-term, this would keep me looking for something that offered these features. (5) is just a nice-to-have. Hope this helps as the Affinity DAM team consider how the app will work. What do other people think, what's important to you?

Love your software. I wonder if you guys have any plans for a Lightroom alternative I look forward to the Indesign replacement next year.