DAM-Take a look at Excire Foto

Has anyone else here tried Digikam? https://www.digikam.org I found it through another blog whilst also looking for a Lightroom replacement. So far, I’ve found it great. It does take a bit of understanding to get the look and features you want lined up but it does uses AI for face recognition, uses your own file structure and performs major functions that have been requested on PL3, e.g batch renaming, etc… I’m not suggesting it as a replacement to PL3 as an editor, but it certainly has DAM plus much more…and it’s free open source, unless you are using commercially.

Be interested to hear others thoughts on it.

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Worth a look! Although the last piece of open source software I tried in the photography domain lasted about 5 minutes on my machine. Let’s just say that while open source developers are amazing people, open source designers do not seem to be a thing.

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OK, so I did a bit of digging and discovered tat Digikam won’t do tags like I need. :frowning_face:

Animal
  - Domestic Animal
    - Cat
    - Cattle
    - Dog
  - Wild Animal
    - Bird
    - Cat
    - Cheetah
    - Lion
    - Tiger
  - Zoo Animal
    - Bird
    - Cat
    - Cheetah
    - Leopard

In this tag tree the keyword “Cat” appears three times. This will not cause a problem within digiKam but there are quite a few views where the user cannot know which of the three is applied to an image because he might not be able to see the whole hierarchy of the tag. A help could be to tag the image in a case like this also with the parent tag or even the whole hierarchy but it becomes quite unwieldy, e.g. in the image icon if you have the tags displayed there. The second “Cat” can be avoided by calling it “Wild Cat” but calling the third one “Zoo Cat” is a bit out of the roof, I think. And still: there are also two “Cheetah”!

Solution: You replace the “Zoo Animal” branch by a single tag “Zoo” which you use in addition to the tag you choose from the two remaining branches. You could even put it on the top level of your hierarchy if you have photographs taken in a zoo but not showing animals.

Lightroom’s tag hierarchy automatically inherits the tree above it, which is where the power lies. In the example, when I type “cheetah” in LR I would be shown two choices:

Cheetah < Wild Animal
Cheetah < Zoo Animal

In either case, the Animal keyword would also be inherited.

An impressive looking piece of software otherwise.

1 Like

On Mac I use Notes.
Make different tag list, like general for birds, wildlife, landscape, urban.
All I need to add afterwards is the specific name. Copy/paste them but I do this in PM.

*edit
Here’s example, you can always check online for list and modify what you already have.

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Or of course the sport you shoot plus the words photography, photographer, photos, and photo.

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*Adding the location after the word “travel” is a great way to tag your travel photos.

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I get what you mean. I don’t do detailed tagging, so haven’t really noticed that limitation. It’s handy for batch renaming and watermarking, which aren’t available in PL3, though, as I don’t want LR again.

I used a similar method for a while until I realised I could still use Lightroom, but the maintenance is a bit of a mission, and applying is not as straightforward as native hierarchical keywording.

I’m sure I’ve explained elsewhere in (excruciating) detail how I have my tags set up. If it’s a picture of a mountain or a horse, then I’ll probably make do with just “mountain” or “horse”, not even going to “Instagram level”. It’s when I get into my aircraft pictures that I go crazy.

I can type “NZ7” Enter “NZW” Enter “RNZ” Enter — a mere 12 keystrokes — and here’s what I get.

C-130, Hercules, Lockheed, NZ7001, NZWN, RNZAF, Royal New Zealand Air Force, Wellington International Airport, aircraft

The above list contains the keywords I typed/selected, plus those higher in the hierarchy and some synonyms.

Some of it comes up quick because I had recently used the same keywords, but even if not I can type a few more characters or pick off the list that appears. It really is this smart auto-complete, including the pick list of matches, that confers the power and lets me add keywords to hundreds of photos in one sitting. I usually spend far more time researching the exact aircraft identities and types than I do entering them. I can also easily do some rearranging of the tree with simple drag and drop (often needed to clean up some older conventions I used to use).

I can even create new keywords on the fly. If I didn’t already have NZ7001’s sibling NZ7002 defined, I will have typed NZ70 and realised it is not auto-completing, so I could just continue typing “NZ7002 < C-130” and hit Enter. That will automatically add it to the tree branch as aircraft > Lockheed > C-130 (Hercules) > NZ7002.

Furthermore, it handles the animal scenario above very well, as I mentioned in my previous post.

It’s one of the top 4, IMHO, but surpassed by Photo Supreme, iMatch and Daminion. Daminion Standalone is also free for up to 15,000 images (at least it was last time I checked) if budget is an issue and quantity isn’t. Personally my preference is Photo Supreme.

See also Recommended alternatives to lightroom for cataloging & integration with DXO

Yes, it’s poor practice. The solution - irrespective of the DAM - is to build up your own hierarchy over time, rather than relying on anything pre-built, focusing on good practice and what’s important to you - as zkarj’s example illustrates very well.

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Just switched to Digikam and found out the hard way about having to create your own tag structure. Not really an issue as at least that way you have a set up that works for you.

3 Likes

Thanks for the comment. Budget isn’t the main problem, although I just object to subscriptions, so have dumped PS and LR. My DAM needs are quite light, as I’m only replacing LR. I use Adobe Bridge, which is free and DigiKam provides me with face recognition, watermarking, renaming, file conversion, etc., which is great. PL3 is great for editing, although I have Affinity, too, for the things PL3 doesn’t do. LR now has Canon EOS R5 support which I really need in PL3 - in the works, apparently. Again, thanks!

If you take yourself serious: Photo Supreme or IMatch. Those are the MVPs in the room with regards to DAM.

Of course your wallet has to allow for it. But in general, you can buy those apps once and run them from many years without the need to upgrade since they are feature complete and the upgrades are not really essential.

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Hello @AussieActive,
I have been using DigiKam as my DAM for 10+ years. I run it on a SQL server with a DB containing about 650k photos. I use it in conjunction with DXO Photolab (and Filmpack and Viewpoint) for editing.
This is also hence where my ‘issues’ with workflow materialize:
nested tagging (of raw files), labeling, rating has been available for years while embedding this at source, as has grouping of photos and selecting/filtering photos based on all sorts of attributes. This is not established yet in such a way in Photolab that it can pick all this up.
So for example: You want to work on a group of starred photos of flowers with an aspect ratio of 16*10 that were taken in 2021 to make a copy at a different aspect ratio and add a watermark for allowing to be used as screensavers. You select them all supersimply in one go in Digikam by applying some and/or filters. Now opening that selected batch of photos that may be scattered across many folders in one go in Photolab is only possible using a workaround by creating/using a tag in DigiKam that photolab will recognise and only when your library is appropriately 'organized’in Photolab.
That is just one simple exaple. In my opinion, Photolab is no where near a DAM yet, neither from a user front end interface perspective, not from a database backend perspective.
I realllly wish it was, yet I am ok with it, as Photolabs editing capabilities are spot on for my demand.

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I only can agree @Casper.Blom I don’t mind using finder to find my documents. But finding images, I’m still on the hunt of a RAW converter with a DAM for my needs. Capture One does a bit of it, but apparently devs working on RAW converters simply have not enough interest to create a well integrated and fast management module.

3 Likes

I have been using Digikam as my DAM for a while now, although to be fair I don’t do anything particularly complex with it, and only use it standalone. That said it would be “less standalone” if PL had better DAM support. Let me stress that I don’t necessarily want PL to be a full DAM, all I really want is seamless integration with external DAM software.

On the Digikam front, the software is open source (with all of the benefits and drawbacks that brings), but there is good and bad open source software, and in my books this falls into the good category, as in general it works very well, and the developers are very active. So even if something does not work efficiently, is badly designed, or is just plain broken, it can often be fixed/redesigned in relatively short timescales.

On the feature front, my main gripe is that its trying to be a photo editor as well as a DAM, which I don’t need… but it is intended to be a one stop shop, so that’s really only my preference not a criticism.

Overall, my opinion is that its well worth looking at, as its an impressive piece of software that works quickly and well.

1 Like