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