Pytrouble

Thanks

Pytrouble

Downloaded free trial of the Mac version yesterday. Thanks.

Pytrouble

Thanks. I’ll take a look.

Pytrouble

Thanks. Downloaded a free trial yesterday.

Pytrouble

Thanks. Downloaded a free trial yesterday.

Pytrouble

Thanks

Pytrouble

I downloaded a free trial yesterday. Thanks.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Let's not loose sight of the OP's existing catalog. Any new program should be able to import the existing catalog.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Welcome to UHH. As you will note there is a wide variety of people on the site with a wide variety of opinions. Different opinions are an opportunity for learning so enjoy and feel free to join in.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Exactly. We all want to help. Just keep that in mind when you read our otherwise infuriating posts.

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

Ok, I have read every word of this thread, all 5 pages. I also bought, and attempted to read the DAM book. After 3-5 chapters I got tired of their slapping their selves on their own backs telling me how great their system is, and that each point will be explained in a later chapter. What chapter? When are you just going to define the basis of your so great system. Or do you just have to create x number of pages to produce an "impressive" book to sell at an "impressive" price. I'm not impressed!

So, can anyone out there, in a few short, direct sentences explain to me what DAM is, and how it operates to catalog my photos. Don't bother to tell me how great it is, the people at Digital Asset Management have done that to nauseum. I get the KEY word thing. That sounds good, but catch up will be time consuming.

Until then I'll still be using my file folders by category.

don26812 Loc: South Bay of Los Angeles, CA

I totally concur with the author.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

Forget DAM, it's just an acronym for a number of things. We are talking about a file manager for photo's, or, a database program for photo's. Typically it contains a built in photo viewer, a built in photo editor, and search routines to find all your photo's instantly based on a ton of search criteria, some of which you record via keywords, some of which are recorded automatically by your camera and so on.

Keywords are the main thing you are responsible for, and is what makes finding photo's containing your son, and his dog Spot, or pics of aunt Nelly, or all pics from Xmas 2001, in an instant, even if the pic was filed away 20 years ago. Looking for a good sky background? Well, if you keyworded all your pics with a great sky, you can pick one in an instant and load it into your editor along with aunt Nelly if you wish. A good photo database should make all this easy to do, once you figure out all the methods used by the software.

ADCSee does it all, and is easy to use, ONCE you learn how to set it all up to look like YOU want. ACDSee is very flexible so you can spend a lot of time learning how you want it to work/look. It helps to be somewhat computer/software literate since it is sophisticated software dealing with files and file system issues. No way around that.

For example, I have 5 editors assigned to hot keys in ACDSee, and if I'm looking at a pic of Aunt Nelly, and want to edit it with Faststone, IfranView, Affinity or PSE pressing the hot keys I assigned in ACDSee will load the pic in that editor. You can set up your views a lot of different ways, and assign each to a name and change views instantly. All sorts of stuff that can take some learning to discover, but it's all good. I imagine LR is similar, but I never bothered with LR. For sure, if you are into pics, you need a good photo database.

Photocraig

Not to be contrary, but I've used Creative Cloud for years and find that the one or two times that there was a feature I needed in Photoshop was all I ever used. $10 a month for LR is a deal. Ignoring Photoshop (gives me an exquisite little kick) is FREE. And I bet it's still cheaper than C-1 (and easier, too).

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I'll take a swing at it.

Digital Asset Management is a database used to organize your files. Basically a database holds information about a set of files. The most important bit of information is where the file is to be found. After that come descriptions of the file and some useful characteristics of the file. The file itself is not contained in the database. Only the location of the file is in there. Otherwise the database would become very large.

The advantage of a database is that it's compact. It only takes a few bytes per file to describe it (more bytes if the description is extensive). A few thousand image files can take up gigabytes of space on your disk, but the database might only need a couple hundred kilobytes. For that reason it's much faster to search through a database than to search through all the files.

Another advantage of a database is that it can group files without having to copy them to group folders. A few bytes in a database specifying which groups the file belongs to is all that is needed. That way you can group files with common characteristics. The database can place a file in many different groups without duplicating the file in many different folders.

For a parametric editing program, the database can contain the editing parameters for an image. That way the original image can be left alone (nondestructive editing).

This is not a complete description but should give you some idea of what it does. Ask more questions if it's not providing answers you need.