7 Management Photos

[Sadoth Royer]

HiI know this has been discussed before, but I am currently just filing my photos into windows explorer with a date and few words in the file name on what they are and they are stored in the cloud. My photo library has now become too big for me to remember where things are and I spend a lot of time looking for photos I want to find. I'm really enjoying using Affinity Photo (and know there's no photo file management system yet available). I am looking for something that would have a one-off payment as I don't want to lock into a subscription. It doesn't need to be free, but I am hoping for something that wont get discontinued (eg Picasa). I've had a search on the internet and have a couple of names: Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Bridge, Phototheca3, Abemeda, XNViewMP, Irfanview - I know there are more, but I got a bit overwhelmed. I don't need a program that edits as I have Affinity for that, so just a photo file management system I can use in conjunction with Affinity Photo is what I need. I use Windows. Can anyone suggest something - I'm not looking for anything too complex.

Check out Photo Supreme. It is a DAM, and a powerful one. It is not for editing (like Luminar, Capture One, On1, or Lightroom) nor is it a raw processor. It focusses exclusively on file management. Paid, not free. Available for Mac and Windows.

Thanks for the tip on FastRAW Viewer, I bought a seat based on your recomendation after trying it out for about 30 minutes. It isn't without some issues, but seems nice and streamlined for strictly culling.

And you are correct, Mechanic is much more about Culling than a traditional DAM. I think my perspective is that is also has robust tagging and metadata so with the goal of searching for a photo - it doesnt' help cover that need.

As someone who has recently decided, for various reasons but principally cost saving, that after many years I am going to switch from LS/PS to Affinity Photo the question of which DAM to use is very significant. Needless to say the preference would be an Affinity DAM with the obvious opportunity of it being a Persona and hence part of Photo/Publisher/Designer and thus completing the set as part of Studio Link. However, from what I can gather from my very short time delving into the Affinity world, there is little or no prospect of that happening soon or indeed at all which is a great shame.

Therefore the search for a DAM to enable me to continue to use the excellent collections/smart collections in LR continues. There is Bridge which is free to anyone and after looking at some of the options it does look very competitive. However if you have had an Adobe subscription for LR Classic it turns out you can continue using it even after your subscription runs out. Needles to say things which plug into the wider Adobe CC world cease to function but the pure DAM side is alleged to continue working. If that is indeed the case I will probably stick to that for now whilst I look for sensibly priced, by that I mean free in an ideal world, alternative or the Affinity DAM does materialise. There are downsides to both Bridge and LR in that neither recognize afphoto and hence you have to use tiff or export a JPG to provide a thumbnail but that is doable albeit a bit of a pain.

As an aside I of the opinion, that after my brief time using Affinity Photo, I am starting to find it better than PS in many ways. Some of what I initially thought were negatives simply turn out to be different and/or the way AP works is such that essential steps in PS are simply not required. For example smart objects in PS are important but in AP seem to be almost redundant as a concept.

It isn't cheap and I'm pretty sure it is tied to once single installer. I have it one one computer but I never use it (outside of the previewer function built into windows explorer). It does theoretically have some more advanced function such as face recognition and searches.

I can only speak to Photo Supreme, which is the DAM that I am using. If you add the ".afphoto" extension to its Preferences, it can handle Affinity Photo files quite nicely. For display, it uses the embedded preview in the .afphoto file. For metadata, it will create an .xmp sidecar. The only "workaround" it has to employ is that it cannot use its embedded Viewer to look at an .afphoto file - for that, it will launch the Affinity Photo app. I have had absolutely no issues using Affinity Photo files inside of Photo Supreme.

The (for private use) free software XNview is also capable of showing .afphoto files' embedded preview. But the viewer shows an enlarged view of that as well. At least it stays within the program and doesn't start external apps for this. The enlarged view of the embedded preview usually is good enough for all tasks related to photo management (tagging, renaming, sorting etc.)

If you work with international artists and photographers, the native support of unicode in filenames and/or meta data comes in handy. Works on various OS, 32bit as well as 64bit versions available.

Disclaimer: This is not meant to be an advertising. I'm merely a user of this program. I neither have any connections to that software nor its developers beyond this.

I have looked at ACDSee and installed the free trial. Sadly it is very slow and resource hungry in daily use, and indeed during it's indexing phase which took 60+ hours and consumed 50% cpu whilst doing that, and I have dismissed it as an alternative.

At the moment I have to say that it looks like I will retain the use of LR Classic, assuming that it does still work as a DAM after the subscription expires a stated, with some workrounds. The other alternative is Bridge which does most of what I would like but again required workrounds to use with AP.

You might want to look at Neofinder ( ). I have been using it for 2 years now and I love it. Even though the software origine was for a file cataloger (back in 1998) the product evolved over the last 25 years as becoming a great alternative to all those expensive DAM software that most of them will not even deal with Affinity files format. Cataloging is super fast and it has many features to handle your thousands of photos. I manage over 50,000 pictures with it and still growing. It manages GPS, EXIF/ XMP / IPTC data. It has ratings, colour labels, keywords. It is a real database with very good search capabilities.

May I suggest: TotalCommander as file management, Yes I know it is an old dos application, but it has proved its superior capacity through the years. You can do all the tasks You want, copy, move, delete rename. You name it Total Commander has it. It works perfect in windows. It was created many years ago by Peter Norton, (as Norton diskdoctor) the first to develop programs to help us beginners.

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