A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system for Affinity using Windows Explorer and Adobe Reader?

[Ben Wiens]

0. Preface
This sums up my 6 months of trials to organize and find large quantities of files and especially Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo files on a Windows 11 computer. Similar methods might apply to an Apple system. As many of you are aware, there is no proper DAM or even a preview handler for Affinity files which makes it impossible to preview or search for text, vector, or raster information within multiple Affinity files. Affinity generated thumbnails provide limited information, can't be searched for text, and this feature is unreliable on many computers. Feedback on my proposed presently available DAM system that is suitable for a variety of file types to overcome this is welcome.

1. Introduction
There is no point in creating digital files unless you can find them quickly later! I am considering using Affinity Publisher for most of my documents, illustrations, and manipulated images, but also for a type of Zettelkasten note taking system because it combines text, vector, and raster images so well but this could generate 1,000,000 files in my lifetime. Finding Affinity Designer files is also important for artists who produce 1,000s of illustrations. Finding Affinity Photo files is also important for photographers who create 1,000s of manipulated images but also need to find up to 1,000,000 or more photos.

2. Proposed system using Windows Explorer and Adobe Reader
My proposed DAM system uses:

a. Windows Explorer with the PowerToys extension by Microsoft and PDF Property Extension by Coolsoft.

b. Adobe Reader.

c. Metadata created by Affinity and users using Window/References/Fields or entered data using Windows Explorer for other file types.

My proposed system relies on a combination of file information, metadata that is stored in the programs file, and keyword searching in documents that contain text. This then covers all kinds of files whether they are text based or not. Of course you can find all types of files through the basic file information like the file name or date created which is fast for finding frequently used files. Or you can find files using the thumbnails which is great for file types like jpg. Or you can do keyword searching inside documents like docx, pdf, or txt files in Windows Explorer. In my system, ideally most files, whether Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo, or Adobe Creative Cloud would be always exported out to pdf. This is the only way that the metadata inside Affinity files is viewable in Windows Explorer with the PDF Property Extension installed. Here you can filter the metadata and find files. But if you are also searching for text in pdf documents, then you would use Adobe Reader which has a search feature which allows for searching in both text in the document and also in multiple metadata fields in the same search (available in the multiple file search). This search creates a list of files the word is found, this can be expanded to show lines where words are found, lines can be selected which shows highlighted text in the fully formatted pdf document. This is the same as Affinity Publisher has using Text/Find for individual files and is superior to what most other search programs use. 

3. I experimented with a wide variety of DAM, Search, File Management and Viewing programs. 
I trialed a wide variety of (a) DAM programs including iMatch, abeMeda, XnView MP, Eagle, and Adobe Bridge, (b) Search programs including Agent Ransack, Copernic, Listary, DocFetcher, Everything, and Seekfast, and (c) File Management programs like Windows Explorer, Total Commander, and Double Commander.

a. In the under U$150 DAM category, I don't like the solutions because they require creating external metadata that doesn't reside in the file and so isn't easily portable and these DAMs don't have the ability to search for text, they are used primarily for organizing photographs in formats like jpg which have readily available viewers.

b. I didn't like most of the Search programs because they are inferior to Adobe Reader which can search multiple files, creates a list of files the word is found, this can be expanded to show lines where words are found, lines can be selected which shows highlighted text in the fully formatted pdf document. 

c. I found Windows Explorer with the extensions was more powerful for locating documents and previewing files than the other programs. But Total Commander is better at handling file maintenance functions like copying, moving, syncing and renaming.

4. Fine tuning the DAM

a. File name
Windows allows for long total file names. In the ideal computer filing system for user files created, each file on the computer would be unique and so files could be moved between temporary project folders and then put back in the collection. Even in the paper file card based Zettelkasten system each card had a unique code and so if it was taken out of the file box for writing a paper it could be put back in a certain spot in the box later. Really long file names are difficult to work with and take up too much space in the file manager however but short files names are less descriptive. Camel mode is considered the best type of file name format as there are no spaces and makes searching filenames easier. An example is 2024Mar18FindingFilesAffinity.pdf. Using metadata allows adding extra information so that a shorter file name can be used which is more practical.

b. File date
The computer will generate the Date modified and Date created but these dates keep changing so many professional photographers will start the file name with the date in Year/Month/Day format at the start of the filename. For photographs this is generally the date the picture was shot but in documents this could be the date when it was first written or in the case of revisions a particular version.

c. Icons or file extensions
If a computer file directory has a mixture of different file extensions, it doesn't make that much sense to find for example Affinity Publisher files by looking at the icons or logos of the program. This is because it is better to display the Type in the Windows Explorer Details view and then sort by Type. But when looking at individual files seeing the icons might be some help.

d. Icons or thumbnails
When I ticked the box in Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo to save a thumbnail then I should see that thumbnail in Windows Explorer when I select to display Icons. If a thumbnail was saved then this should be displayed vs an icon for the program type. Even displaying the Extra Large Icons doesn't result in that big an image. And the image file size is quite small. For certain vector and raster images there is likely enough detail to identify the right file but for documents done in 10 pt text the thumbnail is not that valuable. Displaying thumbnails doesn't work with my computer system for Affinity files but it does for many other files especially with the PowerToys extension and can be a big help in finding files.

e. Windows Explorer preview window
In Windows Explorer a Preview can be chosen to be shown. If Windows Explorer has a preview handler for the file type then the document, illustration, or image will appear with the same resolution as if it was opened in the actual program. There is for example a preview handler for Microsoft Word, NotePad in Windows Explorer and this means that the entire document can be read in the preview. Selecting the icon on upper right can toggle between full width table view or table and preview mode, this is a big time saver compared to many other programs. Affinity programs don't display in the preview. This is because there is no preview handler available for Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo files in Windows Explorer. That puts Affinity Publisher at a disadvantage compared to Microsoft Word and many other programs that have preview handlers.

f. Search by Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo metadata
Affinity programs allow for the addition of metadata but this doesn't display in Windows Explorer for the native Affinity files. For the metadata to be viewed, the files must be exported to pdf.

g. Adding metadata in Windows Explorer
Affinity metadata is not editable in Windows Explorer, it must be added or edited in the Affinity program itself. For a Microsoft Word 2016 docx file I could enter tags, titles, and other metadata right in Windows Explorer. Many image files metadata can be edited in Windows Explorer also. People that organize a large amount of photographs rely in batch editing and it would be desirable for Affinity metadata to be edited in Windows Explorer but it's not available.

h. Adobe Reader has better search features than the competition but...
One of the advantages of the Copernic search program is that it allows easy searching with a combination of metatags and text searching in a wide variety of file types like docx, txt, pdf, dwg, indd, ai but it only lists the whole document where the search word occurs. It does highlight the search terms in a properly formatted pdf but in long documents the user must scroll through many pages. Adobe Reader on the other hand creates a list of files the word is found, this can be expanded to show lines where words are found, lines can be selected which shows highlighted text in the fully formatted pdf document. But Adobe Reader can only search for pdf documents while Copernic can search for text in many different types of documents. Exporting most file types to pdf allows finding the files with Adobe Reader which has the superior search. The downside to the pdf process is that to edit the document, the original file must be found. I think, in the end most files that are being worked on frequently can be found using methods like filename search, so 95% of the time the editable document can be found more directly. The pdf search would be reserved for searching through a large amount of documents.

i. Affinity exported pdfs can be searched on 4 user editable fields
There are just 4 user editable metadata fields: Author, Title, Tags, and Subject, created by Affinity using Window/References/Fields which can be searched with Adobe Reader. There are other fields like Rev and Comments which are saved in the Affinity file which are useful in providing information about the file which are not exported with the pdf file and can only be viewed in the Affinity programs.

j. Advantage of Windows Explorer plus Adobe Reader DAM
In my DAM, all the metadata is stored in either the Windows Explorer file system or the metadata directly in the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, or jpg file itself. There is no external database that has a lookup table to reference to the file itself. It is true that saving as a pdf for searching purposes adds an extra file but the metadata still exists in the editable file and stays with it no matter where the file is moved to. The pdf can be recreated if the pdf is lost. Many authors, researchers, and companies already have 1,000s of pdf on their computers. The DAM I propose is low cost as Windows Explorer comes with Windows 11, PowerToys is a free add on, PDF Property Extension by Coolsoft is free to use or it's suggested by donation for business use, and Adobe Reader is free. There is no lock in to a single DAM, any kind of DAM or Search program that uses metadata can be used.

5. Conclusion
With my DAM, if Affinity comes up with their own DAM in the future, hopefully it will also be based on metadata stored in the file and the user could simply move over to the Affinity DAM when that time comes without having to recreate any of the metadata, this could literally be a one hour changeover.

[Guest]

Unfortunately beating a dead horse!!!  Serif has made it clear that there is no appetite for a DAM

But excellent well thought out discussion...

[mopperle]

And IMHO there is absolutely no need for another DAM done by Affinity. I use one, which totally independent from any kind of other software, sticks to standards and allows nearly everything you can imagine.

Serif should stick to their main apps. There are alot of thing that need to be improved and there are a lot of requests for usefull enhancements. Ands as they have limited resources they have to set priorities.

[Guest]

@mopperle Which DAM do you use?  MacOS compatible?

 

[mopperle]

IMatch, Windows only. When I had a Mac some years ago, it was running in a VM quite well. But then I moved away from Mac.

[dominik]

53 minutes ago, KC Honie said:

Serif has made it clear that there is no appetite for a DAM

Hi @KC Honie,

may I ask where you get this information from ('made it clear')?

From my knowledge there was a DAM development going on some time ago:

But I never read a statement by Serif that they will never release a Digital Asset Management (DAM). Of course I may have missed such a statement. I am curious and interested to get more information on this topic.

Thanks.

d.

[Ben Wiens]

15 minutes ago, mopperle said:

IMatch, Windows only.

iMatch does not do word searching in documents or illustrations. For 50% of the Affinity users iMatch doesn't do the job. I'm not going to put 10,000 keywords in iMatch to search on. But really does iMatch even do a good job for photographers? I think not because Affinity Photo is a closed format and you can't see what's in the Affinity Photo picture in iMatch. Maybe you can see the thumbnail but that's really a crude picture. No DAM maker has yet been able to create a Preview Handler for Affinity files. Affinity Preview Handler only displays the thumbnail, and not even in the preview. One of the key points in my article was that it would be better for Affinity to create a DAM using the metadata in the Affinity file rather than external metadata like I think all the other low cost DAMs use.

[Guest]

@dominik There was a subsequent statement in these forums where development had been abandoned...  Then crickets.

But who know what might happen with Canva at the helm.

[PaulEC]

Maybe Affinity will produce their own DAM one day, maybe they won't, but, that being the case, how can anyone know what features may or may not be included in it, - if it is ever produced? So, why is there such insistence on wanting an app, without having any idea what it may actually include, or how good, or bad, it may be? It may well be that, if Affinity ever do produce a DAM, it will be no better than what is already available!

[Guest]

@Ben Wiens With a claimed ~3 million users, I blame Serif for not working with 3rd party developers...

[dominik]

2 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

So, why is there such insistence on wanting an app

Personaly I do not insist. I am interested.

Some kind of management of digital assets within Affinity apps themself to me looks more logical than an e.g. video editing app.

With asset management and font management inside the apps we already have basic functionality. Content packs can be synchronized online. The missing link is an app or web app that integrates all of these.

d.

 

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, dominik said:

Personaly I do not insist. I am interested.

Some kind of management of digital assets within Affinity apps themself to me looks more logical than an e.g. video editing app.

With asset management and font management inside the apps we already have basic functionality. Content packs can be synchronized online. The missing link is an app or web app that integrates all of these.

d.

 

For me I have:

Approaching 1m images
Thousands of video clips
Hundreds of fonts (I only use about a dozen, hahahaha)
Thousands of Backgrounds, Textures, Brushes, Luts, Swatches, Vector Graphics, etc

I want to be able to peruse the assets, load and use the ones that I need for a particular project and move on to the next project with it's unique asset needs.

The lack of a DAM makes all of that a grueling manual process.

For many of us a DAM is not a nice to have but an integral part of the work flow...

[mopperle]

3 minutes ago, Ben Wiens said:

because Affinity Photo is a closed format

like all others like Indesign, QuarkExpress etc. And IMHO this is not the job of a DAM. Any DAM should stick to standards, simply because of portabilitiy and exchange between other DAMs. Reengineering of proprietary formats is not a good idea.

9 minutes ago, Ben Wiens said:

iMatch does not do word searching in documents or illustrations.

And thats why there are metadata which is a Standard. A bunch of characters (text) in a file is not part of the metadata, And what about binaries like this:

This is a publisher file. How do you want to serch it? Thats why you can add metadata to a afpub file.

[Ben Wiens]

5 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Maybe Affinity will produce their own DAM one day, maybe they won't, but, that being the case, how can anyone know what features may or may not be included in it, - if it is ever produced? So, why is there such insistence on wanting an app, without having any idea what it may actually include, or how good, or bad, it may be? It may well be that, if Affinity ever do produce a DAM, it will be no better than what is already available!

The reason for hoping that Affinity will produce a DAM is that only they can produce a high resolution preview handler for it which is useful for Publisher, Illustrator, and Photo files. There are Search programs that can read Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop files but somehow the Affinity format can't be cracked it seems. In the meantime I created a DAM solution involving Windows Explorer and Adobe Reader that hopefully at least lines up with what Affinity will create for a DAM, they will likely use their own metadata system.

[mopperle]

5 minutes ago, Ben Wiens said:

they will likely use their own metadata system.

Hopefully not. Would be the biggest mistake to create another proprietary solution.

[Ben Wiens]

5 minutes ago, mopperle said:

like all others like Indesign, QuarkExpress etc. And IMHO this is not the job of a DAM. Any DAM should stick to standards, simply because of portabilitiy and exchange between other DAMs. Reengineering of proprietary formats is not a good idea. And thats why there are metadata which is a Standard. A bunch of characters (text) in a file is not part of the metadata.

When I download a paper of 50 pages in length I have no idea which one of the ideas in there I'm going to be really interested in finding some time later. I'm not going to spend 4 hrs keying in 10,000 words of metadata when I might down load thousands of these files. Companies sometimes have 1,000,000 of these files in their system. For people that use documents a lot, keyword searching is where it's at. That is why the DAM I suggested uses Adobe Reader as it searches on both metadata and document keywords, this results in a search that is about 10,000 times better than just searching on metadata. Adobe Acrobat format is a binary compressed format but they and others sure have figured out how to do keyword searching in it but then Adobe Acrobat is now an open format which is not the case for Affinity files. 

[Pšenda]

12 minutes ago, dominik said:

The missing link is an app or web app that integrates all of these.

Given the nature of the new owner of Affinity, I would expect there to be more significant integration with the existing web Canva application, including at the asset management level. So I wouldn't be surprised if some web DAM, combined with asset/photo storage, etc., were available over time. Of course, with the advantages and disadvantages that come with it, and probably a paid one.

[Ben Wiens]

2 hours ago, mopperle said:

Hopefully not. Would be the biggest mistake to create another proprietary solution.

This is why my DAM converts any unreadable content to pdf format. This is a standard. Almost all programs can export to pdf. Now a huge variety of file types can be converted into one commonly accepted format. Now the pdf can be searched for both metadata and words in the document. Sure it seems clumsy because every file has a duplicate. But in my tests yesterday, the pdf saved without embedded fonts on average is only 41% of the Affinity file size. This is way smaller than an average thumbnail. This method deals with realities of life, that there are so many competing formats out there and no one DAM can ever read them all. A DAM that can search on both metadata and words in the document, I repeat, is about 10,000 times more valuable than a DAM that just uses metadata. And most people and companies already have many thousands of pdfs and in some cases 1,000,000 pdfs in their system. Almost all low cost DAMs use proprietary metadata. This means they aren't transferable to other DAMs. The metadata in an Affinity file is part of the pdf standard so I'm suggesting Affinity should line up with this standard if they produce their own DAM, which is likely the biggest standard in the world for documents and there are lots of Search programs that use the Affinity/pdf metadata already. While photographers can often live in a world of only photos, most of the world revolves around text, vector, and raster images all put together in one document. 

[Tracy T]

On 11/22/2024 at 12:11 PM, PaulEC said:

Maybe Affinity will produce their own DAM one day, maybe they won't, but, that being the case, how can anyone know what features may or may not be included in it, - if it is ever produced? So, why is there such insistence on wanting an app, without having any idea what it may actually include, or how good, or bad, it may be? It may well be that, if Affinity ever do produce a DAM, it will be no better than what is already available!

 

[R C-R]

@Tracy T, did you want to say something about the post from @PaulEC you quoted? If not, why did you quote it?

[PaulEC]

I assume my post was so beautifully crafted, and so full of insight and wisdom, that no one could possibly have anything more to say about the subject! 😆

[Ben Wiens]

12 hours ago, PaulEC said:

I assume my post was so beautifully crafted, and so full of insight and wisdom, that no one could possibly have anything more to say about the subject! 😆

Yeah, funny, I chuckled at that. And while you might be sort of joking, that is likely what the poster thought. And this makes me think I'm at a party and everyone is talking over my head and I can't get a word in or be noticed. I think I made some valid points that pretty much all the  present reasonably priced DAMs out there are made for cataloging photographs. Keywords are not that helpful for text based documents and these present DAMs don't also do text based searches for Affinity Publisher or Designer because they can't. Only Affinity can make such a DAM presently as they don't seem willing to publish their file specifications so that other DAM makers can search for text inside Affinity Publisher and Designer files. That is why in my system I convert most documents to pdf, it's a way around this problem. An Affinity DAM that searches by keywords, text, and also has a previewer would in my opinion be about 100 times more useful than these present DAMs for people in general and especially those people that use mostly Affinity Publisher and Designer. Much better than my system that converts to pdf as this involves an extra step. My system is a kludge, but I think a highly useful one because we don't have anything better.

[Guest]

I frankly don't want a DAM that creates a pdf of all of my assets.  I don't have the storage space for that many pdf files.

I want a DAM that uses a proper database to catalog the metadata of each and every asset (image, document, brush background, etc) with a small preview.  By Serif/Canva rolling their own hopefully in addition to managing images, documents, and designs, you will also be able more effectively manage brushes, backgrounds, etc.  It would be great to associate specific digital tools with an image and those load into a scratch area when working on a project.

I just don't see it happening, the people that need a DAM are simply not Serif/Canvas target customers...

[Ben Wiens]

On 12/30/2024 at 8:17 AM, KC Honie said:

I frankly don't want a DAM that creates a pdf of all of my assets.  I don't have the storage space for that many pdf files. I want a DAM that uses a proper database to catalog the metadata of each and every asset (image, document, brush background, etc) with a small preview. 

I never implied that a proper DAM created by Affinity would create pdfs of all the assets. I create a pdf with my kludge because a proper DAM for Affinity is not available and it's way better than nothing. The pdf on average for a range of office documents just adds 40% extra in file space while a small preview image saved with Affinity files or added later in a database adds about 300% extra in file space which makes the pdf option way smaller and at the same time way more useful because you can actually see the fine details on the pdf. You might just want a DAM that catalogs by using metadata and a small preview. But if Affinity creates a DAM they have to consider all the users which use Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo. I'll bet there is a big group mostly using Affinity Publisher and the DAM for this group also needs to be able to search for text. Imagine a company producing many manuals, help files, letters, notes, research, papers. These documents will be used by many different people all with different interests in content so it's impractical to create keyword metadata for these document, people just want to do text searches inside these documents and they also want a readable multi page preview for these, that is the industry standard for text based documents.

[R C-R]

25 minutes ago, Ben Wiens said:

The pdf on average for a range of office documents just adds 40% extra in file space while a small preview image saved with Affinity files or added later in a database adds about 300% extra in file space which makes the pdf option way smaller and at the same time way more useful because you can actually see the fine details on the pdf.

I do not disagree with what you say about needing an Affinity DAM but I am curious about how you came up with ~300% extra file space when adding  a "small" preview image either to Affinity files or when using some database app. How big a preview image have you tested this with (& how are you adding it to Affinity format files)?