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If you use Affinity Photo for photo work, what do you use for library management? It's basically the only thing keeping me on Lightroom.

by pdpi 4y ago

Espressosaurus 4y ago
One of these days I need to give Capture One or Photo Mechanic a try. Dark Table is a good try but just not very user friendly I've found.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. Might be simply because I'm neither a photographer nor a digital artist. In decades of doing all kinds of ad-hoc, amateur, one-off works, the amount of photos and designs I collected is entirely manageable with default filesystem tools (explorer.exe) - or Linux shell, or Emacs, if I feel like being fancy. In fact, I seem to be developing apprehension towards any kind of domain-specific "library managers". I tolerate game launchers/library managers like Steam or Origin or whatever, but that's only because it's the blessed way to legally buy games without having to purchase physical objects (CDs, DVDs, ...). But other than that? For images, in the past I used ACDSee; these days, I use IrfanView. Both have some library management capabilities. I don't use them. Same is the case for music - it's fine of the player wants to provide virtual collections based on metadata, but if it tries to use them to abstract away the file system, I'll throw it out and look for a replacement. To date, I don't use Calibre for dealing with my Kindle, because every time I checked, the app was 90% about library management - meanwhile, all I actually want from it is the ability to convert between ebook formats.
- pdpi 4y ago
  > Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. Might be simply because I'm neither a photographer nor a digital artist. Photos don't have a natural band/album/song taxonomy like music, or author/series (maybe)/book like books. Cameras just give you a date/sequence number structure, which is great for the purpose of incremental backups (just add folders for the last calendar day to the backup). That's almost completely useless for browsing photos, though. When you have several hundred gigs of photos, you need something better. In lightroom I have photos catalogued by location, by event, and by subject, and a few ad hoc collections. E.g. I really like nature photography, so "by subject" means I have them grouped up by species, and "by location" also covers parks, zoos, etc. The reject/star rating workflow makes it easy to get rid of out of focus/blurry/otherwise inadequate photos and flag keepers for developing. I don't bother going for a fine-grained rating, but five-stars means photos I'm developing right away, four-stars are photos that are good but not amazing. I often end up revisiting these and finding something that makes me change my mind once I put in the work to develop them. You just have to actually feel the pain of not having a tool like that, and then buy into the workflow, I guess.

If you use Affinity Photo for photo work, what do you use for library management? It's basically the only thing keeping me on Lightroom.

by pdpi 4y ago

If you use Affinity Photo for photo work, what do you use for library management? It's basically the only thing keeping me on Lightroom.

Espressosaurus 4y ago

One of these days I need to give Capture One or Photo Mechanic a try. Dark Table is a good try but just not very user friendly I've found.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. Might be simply because I'm neither a photographer nor a digital artist. In decades of doing all kinds of ad-hoc, amateur, one-off works, the amount of photos and designs I collected is entirely manageable with default filesystem tools (explorer.exe) - or Linux shell, or Emacs, if I feel like being fancy. In fact, I seem to be developing apprehension towards any kind of domain-specific "library managers". I tolerate game launchers/library managers like Steam or Origin or whatever, but that's only because it's the blessed way to legally buy games without having to purchase physical objects (CDs, DVDs, ...). But other than that? For images, in the past I used ACDSee; these days, I use IrfanView. Both have some library management capabilities. I don't use them. Same is the case for music - it's fine of the player wants to provide virtual collections based on metadata, but if it tries to use them to abstract away the file system, I'll throw it out and look for a replacement. To date, I don't use Calibre for dealing with my Kindle, because every time I checked, the app was 90% about library management - meanwhile, all I actually want from it is the ability to convert between ebook formats.

pdpi 4y ago
> Nothing? To this day, I don't understand the concept of "library management" and Lightroom as a tool. Might be simply because I'm neither a photographer nor a digital artist. Photos don't have a natural band/album/song taxonomy like music, or author/series (maybe)/book like books. Cameras just give you a date/sequence number structure, which is great for the purpose of incremental backups (just add folders for the last calendar day to the backup). That's almost completely useless for browsing photos, though. When you have several hundred gigs of photos, you need something better. In lightroom I have photos catalogued by location, by event, and by subject, and a few ad hoc collections. E.g. I really like nature photography, so "by subject" means I have them grouped up by species, and "by location" also covers parks, zoos, etc. The reject/star rating workflow makes it easy to get rid of out of focus/blurry/otherwise inadequate photos and flag keepers for developing. I don't bother going for a fine-grained rating, but five-stars means photos I'm developing right away, four-stars are photos that are good but not amazing. I often end up revisiting these and finding something that makes me change my mind once I put in the work to develop them. You just have to actually feel the pain of not having a tool like that, and then buy into the workflow, I guess.