New App: Affinity Catalog

[blh]

Hello All,

 

I just bought Affinity Designer, and Oh my god!!! This is an amazing app. 

As a long time user of Photoshop CS, I will certainly add soon Affinity Photo in my bag. And because I also used quite a lot Xpress in the past, I am very interested by Affinity Publisher too.

 

So now, let's talk about the next step.

Whatever the field in image production (photo, document publishing, illustration, graphic design, cartoons, ...) we work on, one of the most important thing is the way you organize your media collection. So, instead of adding features to organize and tag all our media pieces in each existing Affinity app, it could be more interesting to externalize these features in a central master piece... The "Affinity Catalog" App (or why not "Affinity MediaBrowser" App).

 

As some other competitors did in their respective software (Aperture, Lightroom, Capture One, ...), the key points are organizing, browsing, filtering, searching, rating, adding keywords and metadata on the media elements of your collections. And now, let's imagine if each Affinity production App (Photo, Designer, Publisher) would integrate a media browser plugin to provide some smart functions to make the search of these elements easier on media collections, for example based on some criteria defined in the Affinity Catalog App.

 

In that way, your software solution could completely address professional workflows. In my case, having an "Affinity Catalog" App would let me definitely replace my Lightroom software. :-)

 

Maybe (and I am pretty sure), you already have this in mind, so I look forward to have your point of view on this.

Best regards.

Bruno

[MEB]

Hi Bruno,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Thanks for your feedback. We already announced our own DAM (digital assets management) software for later (no timeframe yet).

[arnox]

+10 for Digital Assets Management app. With Adobe moving Lightroom to the subscription model, and Apple replacing Aperture with an infant app, there is a huge void in DAM apps for Mac.

A minimum viable app in this space might be reasonably low hanging fruit given all the code that Affinity must have laying around. My minimum viable would be:

1. folder/file based indexing

2. standards based metadata tagging (XMP/ITPC/EXIF)

3. thumbnail and zoom preview of RAW files

4. edit in Affinity Photo

5. search (db based text search, ..index re/generated in req. #1)

6. camera import

---

Would be nice to have the ability to run Google Nik plugin collection :-) (Aperture API support?)

[nickdaum]

 

I was considering creating the same topic before I found this one. I have been using Adobe Bridge with mixed satisfactions and since I don't intend to use Adobe's softs anymore my old license will certainly no allow me to update Bridge after a while. Anyway it's mostly because of its many shortcomings (you can't zoom a photo!) that I've been looking for a replacement .

I have some questions about the future DAM:

• How well advanced is the project?
• Do you intend to publish in advance the features (may be a short list)?
• Is it right now open to feature requests? I have many.

 

Nick

[MEB]

Hi Nick,

I do not have details regarding how advanced it is at this point, but i believe it will still take a while.

Assuming the process will be the same as we followed for Photo and Designer, there will be a public beta period where everyone can test / give feedback / request features before the 1.0 release.

This will be announced here in the forums/media.