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Hi all-

I'm new to Affinity, but I've been using Adobe design apps for a long time. I'm trying to de-Adobify my operation. I've been using Publisher for a week or so, and I like it better than InDesign so far. It looks like Designer will easily replace the limited use I make of Illustrator, and Photo may well replace Photoshop. But what of Lightroom? It looks like Photo can handle the RAW processing and stacking functions, but what about indexing a photo library? I have a roughly 20,000 image Lightroom library, cross referenced by keywords. I just moved into a new computer, and Lightroom has made a royal mess of everything, so now might be a good time to start fresh. Did I miss something, or does the current crop of Affinity products not offer this group of features? What indexing/organizing software do other folks use which complements Affinity Photo without too much redundancy?

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Affinity has no Digital Asset Manager (DAM) so you would need to look at a 3rd party app for that. There may be plans in the future for a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) but I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, I'm sure Affinity would announce such a project if and when they were ready to start work on such a project.

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13 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Affinity has no Digital Asset Manager (DAM) so you would need to look at a 3rd party app for that. There may be plans in the future for a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) but I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, I'm sure Affinity would announce such a project if and when they were ready to start work on such a project.

Yes, I was pretty sure that this arrow wasn't in Affinity's quiver yet. It's an obvious enough project that it's likely that they're working on it. But, in the immediate term, I'd still like suggestions for a DAM that works well with Photo. I've done quite a bit of research, and haven't found anything that looks promising. ACDSee has nice indexing features, but it's part of a big package that would be redundant and have a steep learning curve. There are a few cheapie DAMs which look woefully inadequate for a large library. There are a couple of frightfully expensive ones which look like overkill. What are other photographers using with Photo?

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@mistergarth: I own Affinity Photo, Designer & Publisher, as  DAM I use an old version of LR, if the fastest when my wife and I will come back to home with hundreds of photos then I've the need to analyse, deleting, voting, setting the proper lens profiles (we have 3 cameras and often we use 4/5 lenses). I've tried a lot of programs but nothing is good as LR to do this job. On the development side there are better products. AP is one of them but his Develop Persona is powerful but slow when working with hundred of photos. I use it only for the 5 stars photos.

Photographer & Guitarist equipped with Affinity Photo, Designer & Publisher on Mac.

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Well there is quite a difference between a real DAM (Digital Asset Management) which are usually bigger content management based systems ...

Quote
Digital asset management (DAM) is the storage and management of digital content, especially media data such as graphics, videos, music files and text modules. Media Asset Management (MAM) or in more detail referred to as Video Asset Management (VAM). It belongs to the field of content management systems.
 

and simpler more IM (Image Management) like systems. A free to use DAM would be for example ...

... and a free to use IM would be in contrast to that ...

... which is more similar here to what LR offers.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Cool. Thanks everybody. It looks like DigiKam is going to fill my needs. I've been trying Corel Aftershot Pro, but I haven't been getting along with it well. All I really need is the indexing capabilities so I can organize and find the shots I want and send them to the editor. The full-featured DAMs are ludicrous overkill; I'm not a corporation; I don't need the copyright protection, etc. that those offer.

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I was learning how to do tagging in DigiKam. I was assuming I was going to have to start all over with a new keyword set and re-do everything. But, magically, DigiKam found my Lightroom keywords and I'm in business. Unlike Lightroom, Digikam can actually find the photos. Hooray! Now, to set Affinity Photo as my editor, and I'm ready to rock.

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I was looking forward to using Digikam after that very helpful tip - downloaded together with "showfoto" but neither opened. I just get the spinning beachball. Maybe needs a tweak to work with MacOS Catalina?

For now I'll stick with Graphic Converter.... not a DAM but so flexible and powerful for photo work. I use it to batch rename photos to the exif-date which is super handy!

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5 hours ago, Geoff777 said:

I was looking forward to using Digikam after that very helpful tip - downloaded together with "showfoto" but neither opened. I just get the spinning beachball. Maybe needs a tweak to work with MacOS Catalina?

I just downloaded & tried Digikam on my iMac running High Sierra. The app opened OK but for all practical purposes nothing worked. Toolbar menu items would either not open new windows at all or only open one once, & eventually no matter what I did the app would freeze, requiring a force quit.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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9 hours ago, Geoff777 said:

I was looking forward to using Digikam after that very helpful tip - downloaded together with "showfoto" but neither opened. I just get the spinning beachball. Maybe needs a tweak to work with MacOS Catalina?

Can't tell how it behaves on more actual MacOS versions, but since Catalina itself actually goes through a bunch of different stricter OS and framework changes, it's notthing yet I would call at this moment a quite stable stage OS release. So previous versions of third party software might all need some rework and adaption here in order work in a graceful manner.

9 hours ago, Geoff777 said:

For now I'll stick with Graphic Converter...

GC is a good tool with many features to work with under MacOS, in a similar fashion like IrfanView would be for Windows users here. - For simpler image management things there is also the cross platform usable XNviewMP, but this one is very restricted in it's search term usage capabilities.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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14 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Can't tell how it behaves on more actual MacOS versions, but since Catalina itself actually goes through a bunch of different stricter OS and framework changes, it's notthing yet I would call at this moment a quite stable stage OS release. So previous versions of third party software might all need some rework and adaption here in order work in a graceful manner.

GC is a good tool with many features to work with under MacOS, in a similar fashion like IrfanView would be for Windows users here. - For simpler image management things there is also the cross platform usable XNviewMP, but this one is very restricted in it's search term usage capabilities.

I 100% agree about Catalina.... there's all sorts of weird stuff going on with my Mac! Far from being a finished product and kind of wishing I hadn't done it (it did after all brick my iMac!). Even after the "fix" things are not right... odd freezes, unresponsive pointer.... very random, nowhere near stable.

I love GC, it's been around for many years, the developer answers emails..... and it's super powerful (in the right hands!).

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It's interesting to see the troubles others are having with DigiKam. I'm running Mojave, and installation was simple. The only glitch was that the developer isn't registered with Apple, so I had to control-click on the installer to get it to install. I haven't had a lot of time to work with it yet, but I've been able to figure out how to do stuff easily so far. The learning curve still points up, but I'm confident I'll be able to build a smooth, high quality, Adobe-free work flow with the three Affinity apps plus DigiKam.

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