Wouldn’t it be nice if the application merely read the file system to find your images? No importing required. We already all have a catalog for our photographs. The poor things languished in the darker recesses of my computer-never getting any love. While this works well for many, I found that there were many files which I had omitted to import into Lightroom over the years, then forgot about them. If you don’t specifically import them into the application, then Lightroom doesn’t know they exist. With many DAMs-including Lightroom-you must import your files into the application. The DAM I chose had to work well with sidecar files.Īdditionally, I decided that I wasn’t keen on the idea of importing my images into the application. This, then, became a requirement on my shopping list. Crucially, virtually every DAM has the ability to read from-and write to-these sidecar files. They have the same file name as the file they’re referencing, and are suffixed with the extension. These files can hold any information you would like about the image file. Sidecar files are small text files which accompany the images files they’re referencing. However, there is another system, called Sidecar Files. This is where the database that applications like Lightroom use come into play. With RAW files from your camera, it is often not possible (or even advisable) to store this inside the file itself. With JPG files, much is stored inside the file itself. Meta data can be stored in various places, depending on the file type you’re dealing with. Wouldn’t it be a shame to feel the need to ditch a DAM which is working well for you because you want the capabilities of that nice new image manipulation application? Meta DataĪll that information you create about an image, such as the keywords and ratings, are called meta data. Advances in image processing applications mean that you’re likely to change that more often. Once you have a working DAM, you can stick with it for a very long time. I came to the conclusion that it would be wise to try to keep these two things separate. For image processing there is wealth of software available, both as purchased options, or open-source. For cataloguing, we employ an application called a Digital Asset Manager or DAM. There are two main facets of a photographer’s requirements: Cataloguing and image processing. I need to ensure that I’m not getting locked into another proprietary system.I need to make sure that any changes I make to the data from now on are “future-proof”.For me, this amounted to something like 30,000 photographs, and around 600 keywords. All of the tags, labels and keywords which I have added over the last twenty years need to transfer over to the new system.Any applications I consider must allow keywords, not just ratings, labels and picks.I need to lose as little data as possible.Having gone through this journey, I came up with a set of requirements which would satisfy my needs: This post outlines my Journey from Lightroom. This post outlines the processes and research I did to arrive at my new system for photo management and processing, in the hope that others facing the same journey may benefit. With the coming of MacOS Catalina-which no longer supported 32-bit applications-that day had arrived. I also knew that when that day came, I would be faced with the unenviable task of moving twenty years’ worth of photographs into a new system. I knew the day would come when it would stop working. Since Adobe’s change to “software rental”, I’ve been muddling along with my old version of Lightroom (version 5). There are enough people reaching into my digital wallet every month. However, when they announced that-from Lightroom 6-they would no longer be offering standalone applications, and would be moving over to the subscription model, I knew my days with Adobe were numbered. Now, I’m the first to admit that they make some great applications for image management and processing. One of the major companies leading this push into subscription-based applications is Adobe. Who wouldn’t want a monthly semi-guaranteed income? However, is this model really the best for the consumer? I’m talking about those application which you used to purchase once, install on your system, and use until you either decided to upgrade them yourself, or operating system changes made them unusable. However, there has been a move in recent years to move regular desktop-based applications into the SAAS world. Traditionally, this has been the realm of SAAS, or subscription-based services. When data must be collected into a central repository-and that data needs to be accessed from anywhere-then the obvious solution is a cloud-based system. There is, of course, room – and even a necessity – for software as a service (SAAS).
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