Every DAM thing sucks

DAM as in Digital Asset Management. One of my hobbies that I have had great interest in since high school has been photography. I have always enjoyed the whole experience: taking pictures, developing, printing and sharing. In fact, I really wanted to create my own darkroom in my house just before digital photography became available.

I have been evaluating the following products for quite some time:

• Google’s Picasa2
• Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite 2006
• iMatch Image Management
• iView Media Pro3 (Microsoft Elements)

Others that I have researched but did not try were the following:

• Adobe LightRoom (beta)
• Adobe Photoshop Elements

It is truly amazing how some of the products do a few things very nice but fall short in some other aspect that makes it very frustrating.

Some of the key things that I looked at were:

• Ease of use
• UI–Is it clunky? It is elegant and simple? Is is overwhelming?
• Speed–Do I need water cooling or a 486?
• Extensibility–Can you script? Does it support plugins?
• How well does it play with others?–Does it use standard IPTC or EXIF? Does have a proprietary format or backend database? Where does it store its data?
• Tagging and Organization: Does it support hierarchical tagging? What about GEO Tagging?
• Offline Capabilities
• Unwanted upselling? Does “encourage” you to use their vendor for printing or web hosting of the pictures?
• Does it support RAW?
• Workflow: Does it support multiuser? how do you import the pictures?
• Cost

Some of the things that were really low on my list were:

• Photo editing
• CD/DVD editing
• Picture sharing

I will starting posting a writeup on these.