Digital Asset Manager - a.s.a.p.

[Michael Naylor]

I’m very impressed with both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and may well decide to cancel my Adobe CC subscription.  Unfortunately, I have over 20,000 images catalogued in Lightroom, so I hope Affinity will release a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) a.s.a.p..

 

[MEB]

Hi Mike Naylor,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

An Affinity DAM application is already planned. Stay tuned for more information.

[Rhomphaia]

It cannot come fast enough for me. Photos is a joke if you want to export and edit anything. Aperture is depreciated and now broken. Lightroom is needlessly expensive and bloated. Given what you guys have done with Photo and Designer I cannot wait to see what you do with a Lightroom competitor. 

[JasperD]

I hope it will not be a Lightroom competitor. AP has been positioned as Photoshop competitor right from the start, that´s not the same at all IMO.

[anon1]

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[JasperD]

:D 

 

True, however OP is talking in relation to his Adobe CC subscription and the 20K images in his Lightroom catalog. MEB is answering that very diplomatically methinks. Following that, Rhomphaia is talking about Photos, Lightroom and Aperture - I am not aware of it being broken BTW, mine seems still fully functional - concluding that he cannot wait to see a Lightroom competitor and I responded to that.

 

I think it´s pretty clear what´s meant here, even if not always stated fully. 

[page3]

I hope it will not be a Lightroom competitor. AP has been positioned as Photoshop competitor right from the start, that´s not the same at all IMO.

 

I really hope for the opposite!

 

Since the demise of Aperture, OSX is really crying out for a replacement. A decent DAM with non-destructive editing.

 

Capture One - limited DAM. Expensive.

Lightroom - Very non-OSX like. Inflexible UI. Apple integration/workflow poor.

Photos - very limited DAM.

 

Not a lot of competition, so the market ripe for the taking...

[Michael Naylor]

As the original poster, my interpretation of a DAM would be just that - simply an asset manager.  IE, a catalogue / database that can search on keywords, etc. and quickly preview and launch an asset into Affinity Photo, Designer or Publisher.   I would not wish it to be an all in one Lightroom/Aperture look a like, but more like Bridge on steroids.   One important thing it should do would be to function as a metadata editor (keyboarding, dates, etc.), and file renaming and moving (something Lightroom is pretty good at).   Plus, being able to do these things as batches.    I personally would much prefer a DAM that is not bloated and is trying tries to include everything - including the kitchen sink.

[anon1]

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[JimGoshorn]

As a Lightroom user, I can't say that I consider the app bloated. Yes, there are things I don't use but I'm sure there are others that do make use of them. Look at what happened with the latest update to LR CC where Adobe simplified the import process and about 1,000 comments were made complaining about how the features stripped out were missed.

 

As far as the UI, I don't give a damn if it looks like OSX or not. At some point, if Affinity does decide to go cross platform, the more generic the apps UI's are designed, the easier it will be to port. Can you really see a Windows app following OSX guidelines for UI?  :blink:

[william7]

 Can you really see a Windows app following OSX guidelines for UI?  :blink:

 

This is exactly why I hope they never port. I chose OS X for a reason and never want to go back to windows. Serif already has windows products with their own codebase and branding, keep them that way. If they want to reuse algorithms and low level stuff by all means (a smart business decision) but keep them separate.

[VIPStephan]

This is exactly why I hope they never port. I chose OS X for a reason and never want to go back to windows. Serif already has windows products with their own codebase and branding, keep them that way. If they want to reuse algorithms and low level stuff by all means (a smart business decision) but keep them separate.

Hear, hear!

[JGD]

This is exactly why I hope they never port. I chose OS X for a reason and never want to go back to windows. Serif already has windows products with their own codebase and branding, keep them that way. If they want to reuse algorithms and low level stuff by all means (a smart business decision) but keep them separate.

 

Well, I personally don't get what this fuss with porting is all about… First of all, Windows ports are essential for Affinity so that it becomes the industry standard and Adobe CS/CC alternative it deserves to be, at least in the Design/Photography/DTP market.

 

Technically, a port, done right, can easily offer a great experience, as long as the UI conventions specific to the target OS are respected. If you look at the Studio UI, you'll see that most of it is made up of 100% native (albeit dark-tinted) OS X UI widgets but, if you think about it, Windows and OS X being both WIMP GUIs that took a lot of ideas from each other over the years, porting the Studio to Windows (especially Windows 10, which is as flat as the latest versions of OS X and, in fact, initiated that trend with Metro in the first place) wouldn't be *that* difficult.

 

Sure, some reshuffling would be in order (the obvious being moving the menu bar and window widgets to their default places in Windows, and that would be an easy task as I wouldn't see that stupid ribbon thing making any sense for a creative app anyway), but it would be mostly limited to cosmetic changes like button, widget (drop-down menus, disclosure triangles, lists…) and scroll bar shapes.

 

As for code optimization, well… Getting its performance up to snuff would be hard, but I distinctively remember reading here in the forums or maybe in Affinity Review that the engine was written mostly in C and was, thus, inherently portable. Add to that the experience Serif developers already have with Windows apps, and it suddenly looks quite feasible, actually.

 

The only problem would be keeping up the feature parity between both versions, especially with the betas… And as for the forums? Well, the user- and post-count would skyrocket (I mean, a lot of the professional creative market is already using Macs, but Affinity being as affordable as it is, it could attract a lot of honest but budget-constrained PC users who would otherwise pirate Adobe CC – coming from a crisis-sruck EU country I personally know a lot of them and would never help them pirate Serif apps as a matter of principle) and they would be twice as confusing. Would they be segregated by OS? Would there be feature-specific sub-forums encompassing both OSes? Or would everything be jumbled together, with the inherent and tacit requirement that all users specify their OS platform when reporting issues (much like they already do when it comes to the OS version)?

[JGD]

As a Lightroom user, I can't say that I consider the app bloated. Yes, there are things I don't use but I'm sure there are others that do make use of them. Look at what happened with the latest update to LR CC where Adobe simplified the import process and about 1,000 comments were made complaining about how the features stripped out were missed.

 

As far as the UI, I don't give a damn if it looks like OSX or not. At some point, if Affinity does decide to go cross platform, the more generic the apps UI's are designed, the easier it will be to port. Can you really see a Windows app following OSX guidelines for UI?  :blink:

 

You know what, I don't really agree with you… If you consider my earlier post, going the “as native as possible” route is the way to go to keep it simple development-wise.

 

If devs focus mainly on features and always use the native UI toolbox offered by the target OS SDK instead of doing those crappy “UI branding” shenanigans Microsoft and Adobe enjoy so much, sure, the learning curve will be a bit steeper for OS switchers (be they temporary or permanent) but the apps will always look as native as possible, regardless of which OS you're running them in (and regardless of specific OS versions; don't forget those stupid “pseudo-native” widgets both Microsoft and Adobe – and even Apple, in the ever-egregious iTunes – also use, which stand out against more recent or even older versions of the OS).

 

And that's a win for everybody, IMHO.

[Rhod]

First post to this forum and I just wanted to add my voice to the request for a DAM which can work with AP and AD (both of which I have and really like) as soon as possible, as I have in excess of 10k images.  I'm a long time Lightroom user (since version one was in Beta) but was never a fan of Bridge.  Given the quality of AP and AD I can't wait to see what Affinity come up with for a DAM.  For anyone already using AP, it doesn't need to have any of the editing capability of Lightroom - as long as it's closely integrated (and why wouldn't it be) so that a keypress takes you into AP that's all I'd need.  In that way the DAM, AP and AD become like modules in LR (only more powerful!).

[william7]

First post to this forum and I just wanted to add my voice to the request for a DAM which can work with AP and AD (both of which I have and really like) as soon as possible, as I have in excess of 10k images.  I'm a long time Lightroom user (since version one was in Beta) but was never a fan of Bridge.  Given the quality of AP and AD I can't wait to see what Affinity come up with for a DAM.  For anyone already using AP, it doesn't need to have any of the editing capability of Lightroom - as long as it's closely integrated (and why wouldn't it be) so that a keypress takes you into AP that's all I'd need.  In that way the DAM, AP and AD become like modules in LR (only more powerful!).

Agreed. It really doesn't need to have any editing capabilities, and in honesty I hope it doesn't let development on that focus on handling the DAM stuff and not worry about any editing stuff which will already be in AP. even if they use the same code not worth the time. besides AP + DAM (assuming same price as other Affinity products) < lightroom so its not a big deal to force users to get AP

[Clayton]

For anyone already using AP, it doesn't need to have any of the editing capability of Lightroom - as long as it's closely integrated (and why wouldn't it be) so that a keypress takes you into AP that's all I'd need.

I would actually fundamentally disagree with this. What I love about Lightroom is that it's not Photoshop, that it has only the "photo development" tools I need, and that everything is non-destructuve. I tweak the majority of the photos I keep, and a major benefit of Lightroom's develop workflow is that you're always working with the original RAW file – each adjusted version is just a few kilobytes of metadata rather than another 10MB copy of the original. And that's to say nothing of not having all the layers and tools in the way when you just want to work on tonal and optical adjustments.

 

Put another way, Photoshop and Affinity Photo are photo-illustration tools, while Lightroom is a photography tool. My hope is that Serif's DAM leans solidly in the photography direction.

[william7]

I would actually fundamentally disagree with this. What I love about Lightroom is that it's not Photoshop, that it has only the "photo development" tools I need, and that everything is non-destructuve. I tweak the majority of the photos I keep, and a major benefit of Lightroom's develop workflow is that you're always working with the original RAW file – each adjusted version is just a few kilobytes of metadata rather than another 10MB copy of the original. And that's to say nothing of not having all the layers and tools in the way when you just want to work on tonal and optical adjustments.

 

Put another way, Photoshop and Affinity Photo are photo-illustration tools, while Lightroom is a photography tool. My hope is that Serif's DAM leans solidly in the photography direction.

I am a little confused by this, AP is completely non-destructive. Next im not sure what you mean by photo-illustration vs photography, PS and AP are Editors and lightroom is storage with some editing tacked on.

[Clayton]

I am a little confused by this, AP is completely non-destructive. Next im not sure what you mean by photo-illustration vs photography, PS and AP are Editors and lightroom is storage with some editing tacked on.

I'm not too familiar with Affinity Photo, but my understanding is that to use the develop persona by itself, you still need to create a new .afphoto file. If I'm wrong, and the develop persona can just save to metadata, well... Maybe I'm not fundamentally against requiring a roundtrip to AP then.  :)

 

Still, I would disagree that Lightroom is just "storage with some editing tacked on." LR's develop tools are incredibly powerful, and I think what I'd most like to see is for Serif's new app to leverage AP's RAW tools in an integrated way.

[Rhod]

 I think what I'd most like to see is for Serif's new app to leverage AP's RAW tools in an integrated way.

As a photographer I seldom need more than LR's editing tools and so this idea appeals to me also.  One way forward would be to have a 'Persona' which is the default when the DAM opens AP which gives only those tools needed for photo editing.  The full suite of tools would still be available but could be hidden from immediate view.  Having said that, there are elements in the Develop module of LR that I rarely use and I just collapse the menu items so that they're not visible.  The one thing I'm certain of is that I'm looking forward to kicking Adobe into touch!  :) (But this is about their subscription business model rather than their software).

[william7]

I'm not too familiar with Affinity Photo, but my understanding is that to use the develop persona by itself, you still need to create a new .afphoto file. If I'm wrong, and the develop persona can just save to metadata, well... Maybe I'm not fundamentally against requiring a roundtrip to AP then.  :)

 

Still, I would disagree that Lightroom is just "storage with some editing tacked on." LR's develop tools are incredibly powerful, and I think what I'd most like to see is for Serif's new app to leverage AP's RAW tools in an integrated way.

I believe you are right about the raw handling however if the affinity dam works like lr with a catalog/database then they have control over all he files and should be able to handle it however they want. I.e. They could do what you want using ap + dam, second I think the reason they include editing tools in lr is for batch editing. I think the affinity dam could benefit from batch capabilities but if you want to focus on one object you should open ap because otherwise they are duplicating things between apps as well as that's APs purpose. If they do it in the dam why have AP. Finally while most people are thinking of the dam strictly in terms of photos I could see them using it for designer and publisher stuff too at which point adding photo specific features is prob not the way to go. Instead you store everything in dam and open relevant affinity app to edit

[Clayton]

I believe you are right about the raw handling however if the affinity dam works like lr with a catalog/database then they have control over all he files and should be able to handle it however they want. I.e. They could do what you want using ap + dam, second I think the reason they include editing tools in lr is for batch editing. I think the affinity dam could benefit from batch capabilities but if you want to focus on one object you should open ap because otherwise they are duplicating things between apps as well as that's APs purpose. If they do it in the dam why have AP. Finally while most people are thinking of the dam strictly in terms of photos I could see them using it for designer and publisher stuff too at which point adding photo specific features is prob not the way to go. Instead you store everything in dam and open relevant affinity app to edit

What you're describing here is more of a competitor to Adobe Bridge than to Lightroom. Which is all well and good, but there's a reason Lightroom is a separate product, whereas Bridge is just bundled with Creative Suite / Cloud.

 

I think this just speaks to different ways we use the software, but I can say definitively that LR's editing tools are about way more than just batch editing. There is actually overlap between LR and Photoshop, in that the develop section of LR is essentially Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw importer in a different UI (and the different context of live, nondestructive developing versus developing once and creating a new PSD). 

 

In that light, I think it would make perfect sense if Serif's LR competitor had a similar develop persona to AP, just with different, workflow-related personas around it (such as "organize" and "publish" personas).

[william7]

In that light, I think it would make perfect sense if Serif's LR competitor had a similar develop persona to AP, just with different, workflow-related personas around it (such as "organize" and "publish" personas).

I could get behind that. what I am saying is that unlike lr and ps affinity DAM doesn't need the overlap the reason being AP + DAM will probably cost less than a stand alone license of lr. If you go the adobe route not many people will pay 150$ for a dam + $20 monthly for ps so lr and its editing tools exist for people who don't need photoshop and the reason for that is to be more cost competitive with other editors.

[Rhod]

Whatever the details, I would encourage Affinity to make this available asap.  :)

[SMA]

What does anyone think of Pixave 2 (http://www.littlehj.com) as a DAM? Should Affinity emulate it or better still, trump it in all ways possible?