Pytrouble

Only one of their programs work on a Mac, the others are all for Windows. I downloaded the free trial of the Mac version yesterday.

Poppirazzi Loc: Los Angeles, CA

Hoping that I fit into the category of anyone, the answer is no. Lr can import Elements catalogs but Elements cannot import Lr catalogs.

A few other thoughts about some questions/issues that have been raised here:

The goal of a DAM program is to find and display the digital images and videos stored on our computers. They fall into two broad categories: a browser or a database.

A browser simply displays your photos, using the folder structure under which the files are stored. Windows File Explorer can be considered a browser if you use the Large Icon view of a folder's contents. Adobe's Bridge program may also fall in this category and last time I looked, it is actually free to use even though it is part of Adobe's subscription cloud. However, a browser is of limited use. If you are looking for a particular photo out of the many thousands or hundreds of thousands stored on your computer, you need to remember where you put it, in order to see it. Oh sure, you can tell me that you have a unique way of naming your folders and files and know where everything is on your computer. But at some point, you are going to be looking for a summer vacation photo that you took about 10 years ago, and you can't be sure whether it is in the Summer Vacation 2010 or Summer Vacation 2011 folder. Or perhaps, you are looking for all photos of just Grandma and Grandpa without Uncle Bob in them. Even the most sophisticated file naming system is going to have a problem coming up with those photos. And if you are using a pure browser view of your files, you will not easily see multiple related files together if they have been placed in different folders.

A database file manager solves the problem of finding and viewing your photos. A photo file has many attributes that are contained within its metadata. Other attributes can be added via keyword tags, both manually and through Artificial Intelligence. The net result is a relational database that allows you to search for and view your images/videos by many different criteria. Here are some examples:

1. All of your files in date order and/or taken with one of your many cameras and/or lenses and/or aperture or speed values.
2. All photos taken on your 2018 Greece Vacation or all photos taken in Greece from 2010 to 2015
3. All photos of your Grandma and Grandpa but not those of them taken alone or with Uncle Bob.
4. All photos taken at the wedding of your brother or all photos taken at any wedding or all photos taken of a bride in a wedding dress.

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Suggestions have been made about other freeware or cheap software. Some have not been updated regularly. The question I have is how do these programs deal with raw files? If you have a newer camera, the raw files cannot be handled unless they are supported by the program. The workaround may be to convert the raw files to DNG format, but this involves extra steps in a workflow. In any event, it is something to consider when choosing a damn DAM program.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Browsers like Adobe Bridge are just as capable of using metadata tags for finding, viewing and management as Lightroom's Library. But the library also allows you to view, manage and edit images that are offline, like when you have parts of your catalog on a portable drive. Using an indexed catalog is considerably faster than browsing for files in a browser - even with star and color ratings, keywords, etc.

On the other hand, if you use virtual copies - Lightroom allows you to create virtual copies, but Bridge does not allow for that. I suppose you can klugde something to work by making a duplicate of the xmp file and the primary image file, but LR does it better. And if you want to save the virtual file's settings "separately" you can use the "copy_name" metadata tag to rename it. Virtual collections are available in Bridge, but the way they are implemented in LR is a little slicker, and you can add images to collections on Import, saving an extra step.

Converting images to a non-standard format - "dng" - will work, but I would never delete the source image.

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

Thank you Dirt farmer for taking a swing at my question. The main thing you brought to my understanding is that a DAM is a database for locating images. My brain likens it to an old time switchboard connecting to all the phones in town.

Now, if I understand this correctly, a part of LightRoom is a DAM database. Part of AfterShot is a DAM database. ACDSee, or a part of it, is a DAM database. And among others, their is a company who specializes in DAM. An original and modified image is each stored once, but can be found in many groups. If I modify an image in any one group, it is modified in every group. Metadata and keywords can be used to find any one, or group of photos.

Am I good so far?

lmTrying Loc: WV Northern Panhandle

Thank you BigDaddy. It took me several read throughs of your post and DirtFarmer's post, for it to generate understanding of what you two are telling me. I'm better understanding what it is and how it works. Now if I can make it happen in AfterShot.

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

Pretty good so far. The only thing that is a little different is that although the original image is stored once, the modified image is not stored. You can export it, but what the DAM stores is the instructions for creating the modified image. And the groups do not store any of the images, they only refer to the section of the DAM that describes the image and the editing instructions for that particular image.

In addition, since it's the modification instructions that are stored, you can create virtual images. In other words you can have more than one set of instructions for modifying the original. So you can have more than one image produced from a single original. Actually, since it's the modification instructions that are stored, ALL the edited images are virtual until you export them as actual files.

I have been a Lightroom user for more than a decade now and I'm not familiar with ACDSee or AfterShot, so I don't know exactly how they compare with Lightroom but I expect they will do similar things.