Digital Asset Management is going mainstream. And most people don’t even realise it. With the development of Lightroom to version 3 (currently in beta) and the recent release of Aperture 3, sophisticated stand-alone DAM tools are reaching photographers everywhere. They may not be perfect at all aspects of DAM, or suitable for every scenario (multiple users in a studio setting or those that need multiple catalogues etc), but for the single user they are a very good one stop shop option.
They are both catalog applications and parametric image editors. In other words, they process the images and keep a catalog over the entire collection. And now that Aperture 3 allows you to export your image settings back into the DNG file, it’s a cross platform and OS solution (who really wants to be locked into both OS and application forever – come on, that’s just not cricket!)
Microsoft seems to have been left floundering in the dust with its poorly-developed catalog software Expression Media. Once upon a time the predecessor to Expression Media, iView Media Pro was the professional’s choice of DAM software, along with Bridge and Camera Raw. Now, many have replaced all three with Lightroom, and Mac users have the extra option of Aperture.
Users who wish to stay with the triumvirate of Bridge/Camera Raw and Photoshop still have an incredibly powerful and excellent set of tools for image management, parametric image editing and and powerful bitmap editing, but using just these three apps, the cataloging side is missing. There’s not too many good stand alone catalog apps aside from the powerful yet flawed Expression Media, and besides, with the maturation of software like Lightroom and Aperture, there is less and less need for the non-integrated approach. True, a stand-alone catalog application will be more powerful than any of its integrated cousins, but a combined approach will suit many photographers right down to the ground. In many situations, even Photoshop is going out the door. Increasingly it is becoming possible for certain types of photographers to manage their entire work flow, from file ingestion through processing to output like prints & web galleries just in Lightroom alone.
The other bonus is that it spreads Digital Asset management principles out there (despite Kelby’s less than stellar attempts at educating the public about DAM {see my earlier post}) and enriches the DAM side of a photographers work flow, even if many of them don’t realise that yet.
I’m still on the sidelines, preferring my Bridge / Camera Raw approach for the moment, as there is something difficult to define, that I don’t like about Lightroom. I’m still trying to figure out what it is though. It feels like it’s hiding things from me. Maybe I just don’t know it well enough yet… Is it really time to migrate to a single app solution? It’s sure looking like that time is coming. Microsoft paid a lot of money for the leading DAM app at the time, yet it seems like Adobe and Apple are leading the way with integrated solutions. Whether they are fully robust from a DAM perspective is not entirely clear to me as yet, but I can see we are getting very, very close.
This is getting interesting.
Richard, in Lightroom, is it only the “Automatically Write changes into XMP” setting in the Metadata tab in the Catalog settings that controls the flow of info back into DNGs? If this is set, ‘everything’ you do to an image in Lightroom goes back into the file? Would this info also be held in the database?
Hi Geoff – if you set up the catalog to automatically save the metadata to the files, then you don’t need to remember to do the pushing. This is what made me choose Lightroom over Portfolio or Aperture as both of these relied on a proprietary database (at least at the time I looked at them). So I’m not tied to Lightroom – and if it goes belly-up or I decide to shift to something else – I should just be able to import my images with all cataloguing information intact.
I should add of course that my cataloguing process does not depend on Lightroom specifics such as collections. everything is in the metadata, IPTC/XMP, where there is enough granularity to do what I need.
Hi Richard
I’m sure you are on top of Lightroom, but for many people the complexity it brings is more than they bargained for. I am a firm proponent of keeping the metadata with the file, but in Lightroom, it lives in the database unless you deliberately push it back into the files (or of course you imported the files into Lightroom already with metadata embedded and fully processed, and then that’d defeat the purpose of Lightroom in the first place now wouldn’t it…) Still, I’m getting very close to going the Lightroom route myself, just waiting for Version 3 to be released.
Hi Geoff – seems like a long tome since I visited – it’s interesting to read your thoughts on DAM. Cataloguing your photos or negatives has always been important of course, (well, only if you want to find them again). I’m a Lightroom user so far, and for me the most important thing now is the DNG format. No need to keep multiple copies of files any more, and of course all the meta-data stays with the file. That means you are software and platform independent – the images ARE the catalogue, so if I want to throw Lightroom away in favour of a new app, it doesn’t matter.