scottburgess
Unregistered
Hi,
I need to upgrade to better photo file management. I found there's a lot on the market and all of it has limitations. Some products I've been glancing at include Lightroom, Bridge w/ Photoshop, Aperture, ACDsee, Photo Director, fotoBiz, StockView, NSCS Pro, and Capture One. Of these, only Aperture is out due to hardware limitations. I am open to looking at others.
Four things I might *like* to have beyond basic organization:
- I would like to have one integrated system for both film and digital photo management if possible--still trying to finish labeling slides, still have about half my images in film, and would like to have one search engine for the whole mess.
- I am intrigued by the Capture One tethered camera control for the 5D III, but not sure if it has substantive advantages over the EOS Utility, which I find useful for macro image stack collecting.
- I like the idea of folder overlays, where one can view the collection by date, or by location, or by species, etc...
- I would like to be able to edit EXIF data (according to accepted standards).
I do my work on a Win7 laptop for tethering, and a dual-boot Win7/Linux desktop for editing, storage and organizing (I do a tiny amount of work in Linux for efficiency; 99% is done in Win7). I do most of my editing in Photoshop/Nik. I have three other Win7 machines (one laptop, two desktop) which serve as occasional backups when a system is down. I do not want my photos in a cloud server.
I am still not clear what advantages each management program presents over the others. Somewhat uniformly all do a relatively weak job in clarifying what advantages their program has in the marketplace, and after a while they all sound alike. Some are also not terribly clear up front on their licensing arrangements, which I find annoying since I have multiple machines.
Which built-in features do you need the most in your workflow? Automation of backups? Support for plug-ins? Editing features of the manager? Support for business transactions? What features would you happily do without, especially if you have Photoshop and the Nik suite? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used more than one photo management program and can explain the important differences between the programs.
Please share your thoughts on this.
I'm not sure if you benefit much in my thoughts on this, nonetheless it's interesting, that you want only to manage your photos in a DAM, but editing will happen somewhere else. So, you will not take advantage of a very good RAW converter like Capture One is. To make C1 good DAM, I was told one needs Media Pro Photo Manager. I admit, I hate "solutions" coming in (pricey) slices. I also admit C1 is an excellent converter, but a pretty poor Assesment manager. What you exclude by hardware limitations is for me the best photo management software* I've seen so far.
But Adobe appeared to copy a lot of good things from Aperture and their Lightroom should make a good choice for you. The integration with Photoshop should be great, I heard. I'm just not such a big fan of Adobe's licensing and business models. Since you mentioned Linux, have also a good look at "darktable".
* my reasons for this statement: wherever I am, be it library, album, smart album, book, slide show I always can make adjustments to my pictures. A backup is easy and I'm always sure all my photos are backupped. Face detection makes keywording a bit simpler for me, especially when t comes to faces I didn't know before but got their names today. Apple goes Cloud, Adobe as well. I don't. And to make that point clear as well, I'm highly disappointed by Apple to offer such a weak product development of Aperture. In most aspects most other DAMs have become more sophisticated than this old horse and it appears to me, it's only a question of time, when the rich phone builders company will abandon their own product which was meant as a professional solution.
Built in features I use: in C1 all editing especially the simple perspective correction, lens profiles, adjusting colors, making multiple exports, using multilayers for correcting shadows and highlight with brushes or gradients. Unfortunately, a healing tool in C1 is way behind Photoshop.
Old Aperture has a relatively good one, I got the whole NIK suite as plugIns (it was recently cheap) but am not using it a lot: a copy of a picture transferred to Silver EFX increases the volume for 200MB. I prefer a RAW workflow. Most plugins work with copies and save 16bit TIF. Same goes for Photoshop, I don't own a private copy of it, it's kind of a funky idea to keep my Mac Adobe-free. Although in general I love working with it, but for my kind of photographs I have all necessary editing functions in C1 or Aperture.
I think it all depends how you want to find your photos again. Personally I work a lot with smart albums which are nothing else than a saved search which is dynamically updated. That's a thing going through all Apple apps and I like that way of organisation because I don't have to think so much about structures and eventualities. But a lot of people have date-based file and folder names. I guess, you too? Windows as OS has educated it's users to think in hierarchic structures, folders, sub folders and sub sub folders. Lots of clicks, not lots of successful findings.
scottburgess
Unregistered
Quote:I think it all depends how you want to find your photos again. Personally I work a lot with smart albums which are nothing else than a saved search which is dynamically updated. That's a thing going through all Apple apps and I like that way of organisation because I don't have to think so much about structures and eventualities. But a lot of people have date-based file and folder names. I guess, you too? Windows as OS has educated it's users to think in hierarchic structures, folders, sub folders and sub sub folders. Lots of clicks, not lots of successful findings.
Not too much, actually--my old slide file system was based on searchable tags. Slides were organized first by subject, but were easily searchable by time, slide number, quality rating, etc... My digital collection is organized first by time, with limited search capability. I created index files by year to make searches run quicker, but that's a kludge, not a solution. I really would like to integrate both search methods in one system. I have a good slide scanner, but still need labels on the actual slides to distinguish them (and I have about 8000-10000 to label yet, yeech!).
I'll take a look at darktable, haven't heard of that one. Some pros I know are moving away from Aperture for reasons like those you allude to. I also am concerned at the cost of Adobe's stuff [and the cloud model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Iw9q2X9cU], as well as the piecemeal Phase One approach. Really hope someone has tried fotoBiz or StockView, and can tell us what they are like versus Lightroom as those two have support for slide labeling, though I worry that the customer base and developer cores are too small on both of those for either to be long term solutions. I want Canon to purchase Phase One outright and create an integrated management/editing program for images and video, but so far that's barely a rumor.
Wish some of these products had migration tools from the others, too, but I haven't seen that anywhere.
I considered digitizing the slides/negatives by having them all scanned professionally and integrating everything on a digital platform but the cost is too high. Would rather put that kind of money into a tilt-shift lens.
Thanks for taking time to reply, JoJu! I appreciate the input.
Well I also started digitizing my film era but didn't finish yet with B/W film scanning. It just takes too much of time which I could easily use to make better pictures than my slides were. Which says something about the quality of my old slides... I want to have them digital, but don't see the effort worth. For some of them, yes, but most stuff I see more as learning exercise. It's much like digitising old records: lots of work to carry some old songs on an iPod and then finding out, there's so much more music to discover...
Keywords could be doing the trick of labels. Most DAMs are working with preview images and collecting them in a catalog, so you could create different catalogs.
Pro's went also away from Aperture because they believed all the stuff has to be in a big library file. Matter of fact, Aperture allows to choose the way, and no DAM is completely stable if you move or delete folders/pictures in the Explorer or finder. All will show you orphan pictures afterwards.
I'm also looking forward to other people's input. I use Aperture, because I'm very familiar with it. And I started using C1 again, because the D7100 is not supported by my version of AA, but running two DAMs is not a great idea.
I am in the same boat and I am dowloading trial versions to see which one to keep,
Canon zoombrowser seems fine, any help woule be appreciated
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