[thxbb12]

The database is honestly the part that I liked the most about Aperture and kept me tied to an already obsolete product. No other DAM, past or current, comes close to what Aperture could do.

This is a problem. For the DAM part I'm still using an obsolete version of LR, so being subject to the o.s. upgrade risks that we were discussing yesterday.

Fortunately LR, in addition to the database, also adds tags to the .XMP files, so they can be imported in other applications. CO reads them, but - apart from the fact that it has poor search tools - also misinterprets them (I'm using hierarchical tags).

I'm still slowly developing my own application for indexing tags - I had one in the past, it's not really hard for basic functions, it's that I'm becoming lazier and lazier about programming... .

Anyway I'm puzzled that there are no good DAM apps around (I mean, for prosumers).

If you're interested, one of my students' bachelor project was to design and implement a file tagging engine in Rust (a modern, very robust and safe systems language vastly superior to C/C++ and similarly fast).
The source code can be found here: https://github.com/stevenliatti/tagfs
Please note that it's meant to run on Linux only using a filesystem that supports extended attributes (most modern filesystems such as ext4, xfs, zfs, etc. do).