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I notice that some people complain affinity photo doesn’t do “DAM” and to be honest it was the lack of this feature that drew me to the program, I only want to open a photo, not import it.

Clearly Adobe have lost the plot and one day people will workout that their photo catalogue will be unusable if they decide to stop paying for adobe's subscription (ransom)

 If you ever decide to introduce DAM into affinity photo, please maintain the option to ‘open’ our photos rather than have to ‘import’ our photos….PLEASE! Perhaps develop a stand alone application for people that want DAM

 Love the software, keep up the great work.

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I don't think that a stand alone app will ever been developped by Affinity. There are already many good free ones. I use Fastone Image Viewer and that's all I need. Before making the switch to Affinity apps I used PS and LR for years and always hated LR catalogs. 

-- Window 11 - 32 gb - Intel I7 - 8700 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
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Fastone Image Viewer does the job very well and it's free. I've been using it for years, even when I was paying for PS and LR. I made a donation to the developper, but you don't have to.

-- Window 11 - 32 gb - Intel I7 - 8700 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
-- iPad Pro 2020 - 12,9 - 256 gb - Apple Pencil 2 -- iPad 9th gen 256 gb - Apple Pencil 1
-- Macbook Air 15"

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12 hours ago, AlainP said:

Fastone Image Viewer does the job very well and it's free. I've been using it for years, even when I was paying for PS and LR. I made a donation to the developper, but you don't have to.

FastStone Image Viewer is free for home users (but I made a donation, too). For commercial use, a lifetime licence costs US$34.95.

All FastStone products are for Windows only.

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On 9/16/2019 at 8:53 PM, PJR said:

that their photo catalogue will be unusable if they decide to stop paying for adobe's subscription

From this, I am assuming you are referring to Lightroom rather than Photoshop.  Affinity Photo is more like Photoshop than Lightroom.

Note that there is a middle ground: there are programs like On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab that display directories on your hard drive as "catalogs"/"albums" and show the images in a filmstrip view much like the DAM software using catalogs do, but the files remain organized in the directories on your disk, so if you switch software you might lose the data on what adjustments were made, but the photos themselves (and any exported adjusted versions of those photos) are right where they were, organized in the same way, on your disk.

We know that Serif is working on a DAM solution which is evidently going to be a separate program from Affinity Photo, much like the relationship between Lightroom (DAM) and Photoshop (Photo), but it is unclear how they are planning on handling catalogs - whether they will be more of the privately-organized-database-method like Aperture and Lightroom, or the on-disk-everything-in-place structure like On1 and PhotoLab.

 

There are advantages to both approaches.

The Aperture/Lightroom method allows tricks like having multiple versions of the same photo exist in multiple places within the hierarchy, all referring back to the same original.  This can save significantly on disk space if you work on multiple projects using the same photos.  It also allows for distinct album types such as photo books and calendars if the software wants to go that far.  Moving files around and keeping them organized can also be much more efficient because the program needs to update a few fields in a database instead of shuffling files around on disk, and it doesn't need to keep checking the folders to see if some external program modified the files (as it is considered "private" to the structure of this one program).

The On1/PhotoLab method allows multiple programs to use the same organization on disk simultaneously.  I can create separate versions of a photo using the two different programs and they share the same organization of the photos, as does the Finder - no need to reorganize between programs, etc.

 

On 9/16/2019 at 8:53 PM, PJR said:

I only want to open a photo, not import it.

Technically, you are still importing it.  When you "open" a photo from your camera in Affinity Photo, it is creating a new afphoto document which contains a copy of that image.  It may be stored in separate files instead of in a unified catalog, but they were almost certainly not native afphoto documents (or Photoshop PSD documents for that matter) coming straight off the camera.  If you stop using Affinity Photo, you lose the ability to work with the .afphoto files, just like you would lose any adjustment information you create within any of the other programs, but as long as you keep your originals around you can always start over with them, and if you take the precaution of exporting copies of your modified pictures, you will have those to work with also...

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On 9/17/2019 at 1:53 AM, PJR said:

 I notice that some people complain affinity photo doesn’t do “DAM” and to be honest it was the lack of this feature that drew me to the program, I only want to open a photo, not import it.

When users talk about DAM they usually think more about Bridge than Lightroom. DAM is useful to catalogue, sort and file all assets not only photos.

As a designer and printer I work professionally with thousands if not millions of files in different formats, including graphic files, pdfs, photos and so on. DAM (Digital Assets Manager) is required to manage all these assets: tag them, group them, change metadata in files etc.

You may be using Affinity Photo to edit personal photos, but from professional point of view, when using all three Affinity programs, exporting files to different formats, amending old designs for customers etc. DAM is very important.

W11, Dell G5, i7, 64GB, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2600, Wacom Intuos Pro M + iPad Pro 2018.
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2 hours ago, Przemysław said:

When users talk about DAM they usually think more about Bridge than Lightroom. DAM is useful to catalogue, sort and file all assets not only photos.

As a designer and printer I work professionally with thousands if not millions of files in different formats, including graphic files, pdfs, photos and so on. DAM (Digital Assets Manager) is required to manage all these assets: tag them, group them, change metadata in files etc.

You may be using Affinity Photo to edit personal photos, but from professional point of view, when using all three Affinity programs, exporting files to different formats, amending old designs for customers etc. DAM is very important.

I appreciate your response, but I was only talking about my own personal wants, I do realise other people will have their own wish list, I was only suggesting that the option was left open for either/or, not compelled one way or the other. I cant even imagine millions of files to a single individual user, what is the capacity of your storage, I'm puzzled with the importance you place on DAM you're not certain whether you have thousands or millions of files?

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15 hours ago, fde101 said:

From this, I am assuming you are referring to Lightroom rather than Photoshop.  Affinity Photo is more like Photoshop than Lightroom.

Note that there is a middle ground: there are programs like On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab that display directories on your hard drive as "catalogs"/"albums" and show the images in a filmstrip view much like the DAM software using catalogs do, but the files remain organized in the directories on your disk, so if you switch software you might lose the data on what adjustments were made, but the photos themselves (and any exported adjusted versions of those photos) are right where they were, organized in the same way, on your disk.

We know that Serif is working on a DAM solution which is evidently going to be a separate program from Affinity Photo, much like the relationship between Lightroom (DAM) and Photoshop (Photo), but it is unclear how they are planning on handling catalogs - whether they will be more of the privately-organized-database-method like Aperture and Lightroom, or the on-disk-everything-in-place structure like On1 and PhotoLab.

 

There are advantages to both approaches.

The Aperture/Lightroom method allows tricks like having multiple versions of the same photo exist in multiple places within the hierarchy, all referring back to the same original.  This can save significantly on disk space if you work on multiple projects using the same photos.  It also allows for distinct album types such as photo books and calendars if the software wants to go that far.  Moving files around and keeping them organized can also be much more efficient because the program needs to update a few fields in a database instead of shuffling files around on disk, and it doesn't need to keep checking the folders to see if some external program modified the files (as it is considered "private" to the structure of this one program).

The On1/PhotoLab method allows multiple programs to use the same organization on disk simultaneously.  I can create separate versions of a photo using the two different programs and they share the same organization of the photos, as does the Finder - no need to reorganize between programs, etc.

 

Technically, you are still importing it.  When you "open" a photo from your camera in Affinity Photo, it is creating a new afphoto document which contains a copy of that image.  It may be stored in separate files instead of in a unified catalog, but they were almost certainly not native afphoto documents (or Photoshop PSD documents for that matter) coming straight off the camera.  If you stop using Affinity Photo, you lose the ability to work with the .afphoto files, just like you would lose any adjustment information you create within any of the other programs, but as long as you keep your originals around you can always start over with them, and if you take the precaution of exporting copies of your modified pictures, you will have those to work with also...

WOW, I am impressed with your reply and the detail you have gone to in explaining your views, cheers. Personally I am happy to export my completed images and always save/export them with a slightly different file name to maintain the original untouched file. I know different people have different needs or wishes which is fantastic, I'm only hoping that we allow either/or so we're all happy with what works for them :-)

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