Today if you search by indexed creteria, such as iso value or apeture value. You can search only for a specific value. I e. Iso 3200. You can not search for values with logical conditions such as “greater than 1600” or
for a specific range “greater than 1600 and less than 6400” same for focal length and all other indexed parameters.
The Library was first introduced in Photolab 2. Many of us feel it was a waste of resuirces to develop a digital asset manager (DAM), but, clearly DXO felt it was something they needed to do. The Library is a work in progress and will presumably be updated with new and more extended features over time.
Mark
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Since it is in progress, I have submitted this request.
I think the decision of Dxo not to develop DAM was right.
I think the decision of Dxo to index the exif metadata was right.
I believe that adding search tools (searching for a range of indexed values) would increase the usability of the search system.
My apologies, Mark, I’m trying to understand the preference of the original users of PL2 and OpticsPro.
I’ve not used any of the previous versions.
Did the older versions not have any way to navigate across files in a folder? Or did they not support things like ratings etc? If those were not supported, what was the recourse for DAM in those versions?
The Photo Library as it now exists was introduced in version 2 of Photolab. It was a rudimentary first step towards a fully functional DAM. Before that it was called something else and did not have any of the limited search and filter capabilities it has now.
The folder list, however, was the same as the current one, If I recall correctly, and using it was similar in most other important respects. Ratings were supported, but since I generally don’t use them, I don’t recall how, or if, you could filter by them. .
DXO has a small development team. Many users were concerned that too much of their limited resources would be used for the development of a DAM rather than for updating existing features and adding new ones to the core raw processing functionality.
Mark
Thanks, Mark,
Given the note about the size of their development team, yes it does make sense that they not spread themselves too thin then. DAMs can be long marathons.
I do use ratings, tags and keywords extensively. I also need the ability to be able to browse through images as a set. Is there any DAM that is not sluggish like LR, which works with PL2?
(Update)
For example, if I’ve been on a wildlife shoot, and I want to first hard cull my high ISO images with the lowest shutter speed, LR provides me the option, but LR comes with the baggage of having to load everything into one big catalog.
There are a few with metadata features and search features that various people here are using. Maybe some of those folks can chime in. For my needs I get along with the free, and less feature rich, FastStone viewer mostly for culling out images before going to Photolab.
Mark
Thanks again, Mark, for your inputs. I will check FastStone as well.
What I like best about PL2 is the default look of images which helps me reject the bad images fast.
In other softwares like LR, I’ve tried setting some defaults like boost shadows or dampen highlights etc, but those would have to vary by shoot, and that often led to problems for long trips and varying hours of the day. PL2 is the first one where the software defaults give me a good idea of what can be salvaged and what cannot…
FastStone actually has rudimentary PP tools which might be useful to see if an image might be worth keeping, but I’ve never really used them. It also allows you to directly open an image in Photolab.
Mark