Provide the option to use PhotoLab without a database

[BHAYT (Bryan [WIN10, PL7, VP4, FP7, G9 & EM1 Mkii, RTX 3060])]

@uncoy

Could I offer you some cheese and crackers with your post?

@uncoy You know exactly what you can do with the cheese and crackers!

@uncoy

The binary option would allow DxO developers to optimise performance for both plausible scenarios: working with continuous database and working without continuous database.

I am seriously concerned about what you believe simplicity actually looks like.

There are issues maintaining one system and you want to make that two, where is the so-called simplicity in that? (edit actually 4, Win & Mac + With and without DB)

Divide and conquer unlikely, divide and complicate certainly.

You are proposing to sacrifice all on some mythical altar of “perfection”, the “perfection of simplicity”
except that the outcome would be far from simple and the task to get there would certainly take DxO personnel away from the items you cherish most

@uncoy

While DxO have been dithering with image processing improvements, the competition have caught up with both super resolution and high quality noise reduction.

Sorry @uncoy your notion of perfection isn’t mine but you are welcome to it.

[noname (Captain Obvious)]

@uncoy

Many PhotoLab users, perhaps even a majority, want all data stored in .dop and .xmp files.

all what they store in .DOP can be stored in .XMP actually … so just .XMP shall be enough

[bobkoure]

@mwsilvers

Hopefully future versions will add the ability for users to modify settings similarly to PhotoLab and provide an export to TIFF.

Should be straightforward in that a DNG is a kind of TIFF file - like the NEF (raw) files for Nikon. Probably the same for other camera makes, but I haven’t really looked - but TIFF is an obvious container format choice and why reinvent (and re-QA) the wheel?

[IanS]

One answer would be for Photolab to work without the database by default. Database would only apply to folders that have been specifically indexed (imported). If you remove a file from indexing then Photolab would forget all about that folder from a database point of view.