Not sure why you need a plug-in at all - either have an onboard DAM or don’t. I prefer an onboard DAM but not at the expense of other functionality. The only issue with the third party DAM is that it will not recognise the edits in the DOP file thus thumbnails will not be updated. That said, the browser we have now is a nice overlay to a stand alone DAM so just run with free Bridge or the like for asset management and use the DPL browser tab when editing. Adobe Bridge is a pretty good DAM for free and has Open With functionality.
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It seems that more than just a “few people” want this capability (DxO are responding to user requests, as votes in this forum) - but, I am generally with you on this point … I have absolutely no interest at all in DAM features in PL … I just want it to be the best possible RAW processor/image editor.
John M
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Hi John,
the votes don’t say anything at all in this case. Just have a look at all the warnings and the negative comments (with many good arguments against DAM) that are completely ignored by the voting system (and, apparently, by DxO as well).
OTOH, urgently necessary bugfixes or missing camera/lens support don’t get any votes.
Tilmann
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You cannot vote against a feature. You can only overvote it by placing your votes at the top voted features except the DAM one. But because the DAM is still at the top, there are more people for it than the loud ones against it.
It is like not participating on elections and crying afterwards, because not the right president has been elected.
Asser,
sorry, I think you’re wrong. This voting system is far too primitive and feedback from DxO is FAR FAR too little. For example, if people had known that they’d get ONLY a halfbaken DAMish thing instead of all the fixes and improvements they were (and still are) waiting for, I assume their voting would perhaps have been different.
Apparently, voting for something here rather is expressing “this would be nice to have” than “I’m urgently needing it, more than anything else” - and in this case also without being informed about the consequences (mainly in terms of DxO’s manpower limitation).
obetz already pointed at the vote of ColinG that is exactly opposite to what he’s actually writing in the discussion.
I also confess that I didn’t care much about this topic until I realized that all other (much more urgent ones) were not considered in PL2. Including the auto-mask bugfix that I’m waiting for since PL1 came out last year and which was kinda promised for soon this summer.
Tilmann
P.S. JFTR, I did participate and placed all my 5 votes.
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OK, you’re right, if everyone would have n votes and the votes would have a unique priority 1…n, then the picture could shift. In the current state, if everyone votes for the top 5 points, it is not clear, which of the ones is the most important overall. You only see, that every of these points is more or less important. So it is a tendency, that is presented.
The DAM will be extended over the years, so that it will reach a state, where it could become usefull for some people. As stated by DxO here: Wow- Have i missed something?
Yes, I did read that. And it makes me fear that we’ll get that kind of “updates” for the next few more years - instead of what’s really urgent now.
Personally, I’m not at all interested in waiting for several years and then finally getting a DAM that maybe “useful for some people”, but definetely not for me.
Best regards,
Tilmann
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I think, it will not take years. The core features are support for keywords and XMP import/export. If it is here, everything else concerning DAM is “nice to have” and could be developed as one of many features of major releases over years. The correct XMP import/export is requested by many people with external DAMs also.
Searching for keywords and offering a panel for setting keywords should not take years.
Agree, the voting system is flawed. The fact that DAM support got the most votes is irrelevant as it does not take into account all the people that have no desire for DXO’s limited resources to be spent in that way. After all we are not provided with a way of voting against enhancements only for them. Perhaps DXO is attempting to position Photolab as a more direct competitor to Lightroom. Lightroom’s DAM and the need to import into it was one of the main reasons I stopped using it. Additionally I found that DXO Photolab gave me better results in much less time. I certainly hope that DXO will not be using a significant amount of its development resources for DAM development on an ongoing basis. That would be very disappointing.
It is often mentioned that many of DXO’s competitors offer much more functionality for a much lower price. While on the surface this seems to be accurate, what you see is not always what you get.
With regard to PhotoLab’s cheaper full featured competition like ON1, it would be more problematic if their end results were actually better or at least equal to PhotoLabs. I have both the 2018 version of ON1 and the upcoming 2019 beta version. While ON1 certainly has lots of features that I would love to see implemented in DXO PhotoLab, the overall quality of the output and tool Implementation is far below what I can achieve in Photolab. DXO Photolab doesn’t have to be the best program out there for every situation, but it does need to continue to be the best solution for raw conversions.
Mark
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Any voting system where you can only vote “for” is going to be skewed. That is an issue in all voting mechanisms where you either vote for or do not vote at all. How would you suggest this be improved - the ability to vote for or against?
Also, how many users actually bother to vote anyway. Is it not probable that those who do not take an interest/do not vote at all are the silent majority who are possibly happy to leave it all to the devs? How many users does DPL have and how many are members of this forum?
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All valid questions. The only purpose this voting system serves is as a forum for suggestions for the development staff. I doubt any of the suggestions or votes has much of an impact on their development plans. I’m sure many of them are taking into account, but are just as quickly dismissed. The fact that they are not willing to share their development roadmap with us does not mean they don’t have one. Our feedback is useful but it would be unreasonable to expect that they will implement every thing we ask them to and in our order of preference. Realistically the feedback from a handful of passionate users does not drive their business.
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Well said, Mark !
(My emphasis)
John M
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And here is, what a user says, who does not use DxO as his main tool: Viewing two separate images
Or here a user from my facebook group, who bough PL1:
“Hello, I do not see another group to post to and I have a question. I just bought PhotoLab and I love it. What I did not expect is the files are across the bottom. I find that this makes the workflow very slow. Are there any shortcuts that I am missing? Some folders have many files in them. Thank you.”
I can deliver many many other citations, most of them in german though, concerning topics, that have nothing to do with image processing as such. In the end, this discussion does not seem to make any sense, because we are running in circles.
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Viewing two separate images is very different from adding full DAM features to DxO PhotoLab. It would be tremendously useful to be able to see two different shots at the same time. Even this gets complicated though - what settings would be applied? Can both images have their settings changed in real time?
In that case, it’s really two instances of DxO at the same time.
When I think about how much trouble this feature would bring, I go back to John’s POV on this issue:
Note : It is possible, of course, to move back-and-forwards between 2 images in PL’s Full-Screen Viewer - - but that’s never fast enough on my environment for critical analysis of two images. For this purpose, I use a dedicated image-viewer application … such as Irfan (excellent & free) or Fast Raw Viewer (excellent but not free).
The time to choose between two images is before DxO Photo Lab.
I have added some additional notes on image comparison software on Mac at the related feature request. We should probably keep that part of the conversation over there.
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I agree, using FastStone Image Viewer you can bring up to 4 images to compare (not edit). Its very us-full and an initial weed for out of focus, eyes shut or silly faces can soon be done then a rerun with 2 at a time to get the best remaining. As Alec said all done before RAW editing makes it so much faster than having the RAW program do its stuff on all of the images.
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Alec and John,
you are perfectly right. At least I do it the same way. 
To first select the worthy images, I also use FastStone (the best and most convenient image viewer at all, IMHO). After that, only these images are developed from RAW.
Integrating that kind of functionality into a RAW developer like DxO appears like wasting time and ressources, while the result will never be as fast and handy as (i.e.) FastStone. This can be easily done with (widely available) existing tools. The same applies to image organization and catalogues. I fully agree to Alec that DxO should concentrate on their core features and do these best.
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that’s funny…
IMatch is far more then “just hierarchical keywords”. And ExifTool can be considered one of the safest methods to write metadata to image files. But you can use sidecars and even suppress writing to the RAW files. You can easily switch from/to IMatch while keeping your valuable metadata in sidecars or image files.
How many developers do you think “Photo Supreme” has? They don’t even provide an address or phone number on their web site.
Oliver
But I needed just hierarchical keywords and their import/export to XMP, a common thing in most RAW developers. If this functionality was in PhotoLab on that time, I would never have started to look on other tools. I would even pay around 70€ for a DAM extension for photolab, if it would allow me to work in a way comparable to Lightroom’s and would integrate itself like Filmpack or Viewpoint. I have again two posts on my facebook group from people complaining that they are urged to use Lightroom 6 with DNG converter or Acdsee as DAM, because PhotoLab does not cover the full workflow from SD card import to JPEG export. Here a comment google translated from german:
"Hello,
I have a problem since I want to move away from Lightroom I bought ACDSee for photo management there I add my RAW files to keywords. ACDSee generates XML files for this when I open this RAW’S now in DXO Photolab 2 I can not search for these keywords what am I doing wrong?
Greeting Stefan"
Why do you want to move from LR (as a DAM)?
You can continue to use most of the DAM functions even if your subscription expired.
About “what am I doing wrong?”:
This poster mixed up DAM and RAW processor. The DAM shall be used to search the file and hand it to DxO then. That’s the key function of a DAM, so I’m somewhat confused about the question.
What is your guess on how many people, that use Lightroom, On1 or CaptureOne use an additional DAM tool, because the embedded DAM parts of the tools are not sufficient for them? I would guess not more than 10%.
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