selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

Maybe you have not understood what I have been saying.

I get no benefit from using a DAM for digital images.

I only use a relational database to keep information on B&W scans but the records don’t have anything to do with where the images are stored.

I can’t make it any clearer.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

In the lab business, order databases include tables for customers, orders, files, and a lot more. Image file paths are stored. If you move images using the system, the database controls that and updates its tables as needed. But you can use the server to do it, enter a couple of references in the database, and update file locations for all moved images at once.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

That's not the case for the Lightroom DAM.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

If I move a folder of images, I only need to relink one of them, and the path updates… I did it twice last night

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

If you do that in Lightroom you still open up the entire database. If the database gets damaged you have to go to a backup before you can open anything.

With a C1 sessions I can double-click a [Session name].cosessiondb anywhere on the network and access only the files that were in that session. If anything goes wrong it does not affect on any of the other sessions.



Here I opened an old session and it upgraded the cosessiondb file (476 KB) after backing it up. I can delete the backup cosessiondb.backup files at any time.

This could have been any directory on any drive on my network from any of the PCs where I have C1 installed. No pointers had to be moved or updated.

The only thing I need to watch is that I cannot legally have Capture One open on more than one of my PCs at a time.

Phil Singer Loc: Beautiful Downtown Brighton Michigan

And also committing yourself to periodic upgrades of your operating system and hardware. And there is much to be said for always having the latest and greatest. You pays your money and makes your choice.

trinhqthuan Loc: gaithersburg

akamerica

A civil discourse must not include language that denigrates a person's opinion/belief by name calling, labeling or attacking the person with smears. We each and everyone have such opinions and beliefs that others may find incorrect. Disagree with the facts that bear on the issue, and let that live or die. To do otherwise is akin to resorting to swear words that may demonstrate a lack of vocabulary or defending a poorly held belief/opinion. The last sentence in the above quote is a perfect example, and sadly often used by one of our political parties to "beat-down" other opinions/beliefs.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Oh great, the internet police. And from the member with all the mixed up ideas about LR earlier.

While you're considering the relevance of attempting to be the internet police, consider too the relevance of coding your own database to manage your personal image database. Could you personally complete such a task? Would you personally complete such a task? Would the fact that you've developed your own personal solution have any relevance to a discussion of commercially available software for processing RAW? In a make vs buy IT scenario of 2021, would this one-off custom-coded solution be of an relevance?

Paul Diamond Loc: Atlanta, GA, USA

Interesting that this has devolved into a comparison of off the shelf vs custom solutions for a DB. I began selling RDBMS IBM hardware and our software/services solutions in the late 70's. Every customer call, I had to explain what was a RDBMS - even the MIS manager/staff didn't really know what they were or why they were desirable compared to flat file databases. My customers were medium to larger size corporations, NY subway system, etc. and the federal government.

I was asking for the sharing of practical experience with RAW software packages for Nikon. To all who did share, thank you. Since this thread has been given a 'second' life, perhaps we will get a few more UHH'ers to share their knowledge/experience with 2 or more packages.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Well, back when I was in the pro lab business, we used Kodak DP2, the second generation of their pro lab digital printing production system. It was an RDBMS, based on Microsoft SQL Server, but it was also an amalgamation of rendering engine, layout tool, database, and printer drivers for their early digital printing machines. It was an open system, so labs like ours could write all sorts of adjunct database tools to drive it "under the hood." Our IT group built a whole suite around it. I wrote a greeting card printing system in FileMaker Pro to drive it.

It was awesome. We had 40 mini-labs, three wet process wide format printers, three 44" Epson inkjet printers, 22 plastic ID card dye-sublimation printers, a NexPress, a pair of production optical disc burners, nine film scanners (for the first few years we were digital), nine color correction stations with four rendering engines, and probably some things I'm forgetting.

In 2011, the last year we were Herff Jones Photography Division, we had 72 TeraBytes of storage on three HP servers (mildly impressive back then, boring now). Everything ran on a 1000-Base T Ethernet setup managed via Cisco routers.

The catch? It was a 100% JPEG workflow. There was no possible way to process five million packages a year with raw file conversions from horrid Kodak pro digital cameras. And Kodak didn't provide any conversion tools for Nikon and Canon raw files.

So when Lightroom and Apple Aperture came along, in the mid-2000s, I fell in love with both of them and got trained on both. They would not scale to the needs of a lab like ours, but they had all the right tools for handling raw file conversions and to do simple digital asset management for cottage industry professionals (our "Mom and Pop" studio customers).

Mac users should check out the Raw Power application and plug-in from Gentlemen Coders. It is a highly evolved version of the raw converter that was in Apple Aperture, written by the same folks who coded the Aperture raw converters. It can be used by itself, or as a plug-in for Apple Photos or the Mac version of Serif's Affinity Photo. Alas, it IS Mac only. It uses Apple's raw camera profiles and the ColorSync ICC-compliant color engine.

Hamltnblue Loc: Springfield PA

If you are a DSLR shooter then Lightroom and photoshop
If you shoot mirrorless and open to the future then ON1 2022.:)

I gave up on Lightroom and their screwy cataloging long ago.
Currently have DXO, luminar 4, luminar AI, Affinity, the Topaz series and ON1

ON1 has developed into a complete package with top end functions.
It includes the full standard raw processing plus class leading re-size, denoise, HDR, Panoramas, and full masking capabilities. Also includes Ai sky replacement and ai portrait functions. It now even accepts many of the Lightroom plugins.

The others have their individual strengths and may be a little better at individual tasks, but none get even close to ON1 for a full package of great working functions.

There is a learning curve since it has so much available, but there are tons of YouTube videos you can refer to for help.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

I think that both On1 and Lightroom are reasonable choices in a competitive DAM environment. Either will serve you well.

I'm not sure what the statement "If you are a DSLR shooter then Lightroom and photoshop
If you shoot mirrorless and open to the future then ON1 2022.:)" means, though. Are you saying that if you're old-fashioned enough to use a DSLR, Lightroom is for you, but modern shooters should go with ON1? Or, are you saying that ON1 offers special advantages to mirrorless users? I don't think I can go along with either conclusion.

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

You can see more detail in Adobe's How Lightroom Classic catalogs work. The Lightroom catalog is actually a very rudimentary form of database and it serves a very limited purpose.

A relational database management system (RDBMS) is much more complex and it involves many different field types and usually multiple tables that define what can be placed in certain fields. The example I showed earlier for scanned film:



This uses several different type of fields - Date recorded, roll ID, film format, camera, film ID, developer ID, dilution, contrast (N+/- development), development temperature and time, subject matter and indications of when the chemicals were last re-mixed. What makes it relational is that several of the fields are related to other tables. For example, format is limited to 135, 120, 127, 4x5.

Adobe strongly recommends using a single Lightroom catalog. They feel that multiple catalogs can become difficult for the user to manage.

But a single huge catalog can also get difficult to manage, especially if the hard drives where you keep and back up your data start to get full, become unreliable or need to be defragmented.

Sessions in Capture One eliminate two problems. Each session has its own small catalog covering items 2 and 3. The location of the session is up to the user and it is self-contained:



The [session name].cosessiondb in this case is less than 500 KB and the two backups were made when the session was upgraded to work with a software upgrade (they can be deleted).

It's a matter of personal choice. But in my case that choice is also based on some risk assessment. After a catastrophic failure of my 9 year old desktop hard drive in September I'm glad I was not using Lightroom.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Give us a list of all your images shot at ISO-320.
Give us a list of all your images at shutterspeed 1/500sec.
Give us a list of all your images from a particular camera model.
Give us a list of all your images from a particular lens model.
Give us a list of all your images from a particular focal length.
Give us a list of all your images without any edits.
Give us a list of all your images at a particular GPS location.
Give us a list of all your images in a square crop.

Those are examples of EXIF data collected automatically from your images by LR, all supported by instantaneous searching and sorting, allowing for the comparison of images within your digital asset management database, even before we get into the quality and thoroughness of your keywording. Every attribute above (and many more) can be combined to better refine your management of your image assets. Whatever doesn't exist in the standard EXIF from the camera can be added via keywords or metadata templates, as well as the edit status / cropping managed by LR. Your approach to backing up your data determines how much data you might lose in a catastrophe, the same risk as any of your relevant images, or word documents, passwords, account numbers, etc.

These are out-of-the-box features of Lightroom. Only the keywording or collections are user-dependent. Statements like "a single huge catalog can also get difficult to manage" seem authoritative, but are completely incorrect with no relevance to how LR operates, showing either a bias against the product or an ignorance of the relevant underlying technology.

Again: there's plenty of fine software available in the market for every individual's unique combination of needs, such as the effort needed to use, price, hardware / OS compatibility, available training, lack of complexity, and so forth. There's no need to make up false reasons to exclude any of the software options for RAW processing.