Switching to Mac from Windows DAM products that work well with Affinity Photo?

[glenbarrington]

Microsoft and I are not headed in the same direction.  I was a fairly happy ACDSee DAM user in Windows. My mac Mini 4 won't arrive for another 5- 10 days or so.  But I'm contemplating Software.

I'm probably going to use Affinity Photo for Mac, but I know I need a DAM,  I'm too used to the conveniences of a full featured DAM but I refuse to use Adobe anything, so Lr is out, and I don't like it's raw development all that much anyway.  I thought Affinity Photo for Windows V1  did an OK job on Raw, but it shone bright as a bit mapped editor.  I'm hoping many of the V1 issues will be resolved in V2.

There just aren't many non subscription alternatives to Affinity Photo out there.  Luckily, it's a pretty good product overall.

How do the successful Affinity Photo users deal with the lack of a front end photo manager/DAM?  What do you all use?  Are there any things I need to look out for on the Mac? Or, possibly, integrating Affinity Photo for Mac with a True DAM.

If you have a DAM with Raw Development, do you tend to use its raw tools, or Affinity's raw tools.

Any comments and advice is greatly appreciated.  This is a major question in my mind, I've got too many photos to use a photo browser,  I need something with a halfway decent database attached to it. Either an SQL or Hierarchical Data Base would work for me.

Thinking about the following "Front End" products based on my Windows experiences:

• On1 - an 'OK' photo manager with some  extra stuff,but not a true DAM, IMO.
• ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac - It's just the DAM and the Raw developer, and I assume it will allow me to use my prior knowledge.  If it has "reasonably" good integration with Affinity Photo 2, it might work for me.
• DXO PhotoLab (superb output quality esp raw, but in many ways, it's more a manager than it is a true DAM.
• Capture One - superb output quality esp raw, but in many ways, it's more a manager than it is a true DAM.

Anything you can add would help very much.

[GarryP]

This sort of thing has been asked many times before in these forums.

If you search the forums for dam you will gets lots of suggestions and advice.

[LionelD]

Hi, I’m interested in this question.

At the moment I use Adobe CC for my photographic work, but I’d like to switch provided I can find an appropriate product.  After looking at a bunch of reviews, some of which are pure puffery, I am inclined to experiment with On1.

I have a lot of photos, and I use keywords almost all the time.  For historical reasons most of that was done in Bridge, but Bridge is a disaster for changing keywords because of the way it ap[plies changes.  I’ve had more success with LR because it allows me to make big changes to my keyword structure, and apply those to the image files in a single (lengthy but tolerable) operation.  It also gives me a way of “restoring” previously applied metadata when I re-export a file from AD2 (expected behaviour that is not unique to AD2).  My point in telling you all of this is that if you have a lot of image files, you might need a catalog-based solution like I do.

I have Photo2, but don’t use it.

Regards

Lionel

[PaoloT]

14 hours ago, glenbarrington said:

My mac Mini 4

Before anything else, try Apple Photos, that comes with the Mac.

Paolo

 

[AlainP]

I have thousands of JPG and RAW files on my desktop. I tried a few apps and now I use XnviewMP, it works very well. You can open files in whichever app you want. 

If you only work on photos from you iPhone or iPad, the Photo app does a good job. But for thousands of files from many cameras XnviewMP works very well.

[loukash]

As a viewer and catalog tool with DAM capabilities, PixlPath is getting better and better:
apps.apple.com/ch/app/pixlpath/id6445800950

The developer is open to requests and fixes bugs very quickly. (In other words, many features that were added in the past few months were on my request )