This is one reason why we are starting to do more printing. A3+ for the “ordinary” that are worth printing and, thanks to our new “toy” (Canon A2 printer), we are now doing the really special ones on that and mounting on foam-core instead of framing.
There is doubt that proprietary image databases can be very tempting solutions. They are often easy to use with low tresholds for the users but the ugly backside is that they are just proprietary and often not so easy to migrate from and that fact often creates an enclosure that is not so easy to get out of and that might just one of the design goals for the manufacturer of these systems.
In one way or another there is always files and folders at the very bottom of the systems but with an open standard as XMP there is no need to move any files - they are incorporated in the XMP-indexes from where they are. After they are indexed and previews are made everything takes place virtually without reading the original files. That is why these XMP-based indexdatabases are so fast since they just use smaller previews.
It´s also very safe since the metadata are owned by and attached to the files (RAW) or baked into the XMP compatible image file types like JPEG, TIFF and DNG. TIFF should be avoided since it is a pretty inefficient file format in DAM-systems because it lacks a defined XMP-header like JPEG and DNG. In automation processes where images are processed by DAM an automation hub images are even physically moved between folders when they are processed which makes TIFF not ideal. If and XMP-database gets corrupt it´s no real security problem since it´s just to reindex the folder structure and the files. If a proprietary monolithic metadata database gets currupted you are facing a single point of failure that just happened. Then you are totally dependent on a backup to restore. With a distributed metadata system like XMP you really don´t even need a backup of the database since the data is owned by the files. You don´t need anything to restore - you just need to reindex.
A tif-file is the way to go to exchange high quality pics between different editing programs, that are otherwise not compatible – regardless of any DAM.
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Depends. DNG is sometimes a far better alternative dependingbon how sofisticated automation hubs a DAM has. You can do some pretty smart things with DNG in some DAM environments and I’m not sure about that TIFF should have any quality advantages ocer DNG. Many museums and institutions has standardised on DNG as a RAW substitute because it’s more efficient than TIFF and ever TIFF has to be handled according the quality rules since there are 8-bit variants of it too.