Digital Asset Management (DAM) and the amateur photographer
I'm somewhere between an amateur photographer and a pro; trending toward the amateur side of that scale. I outgrew my point-and-shoot about six months ago, and wound up with a Canon EOS 30D DSLR. I'm loving the SLR, and am happily shooting in RAW now that disk capacity is effectively free these days. iPhoto has always been a poor photo management application in my opinion; anything beyond casual use and it falls down. A couple of years ago I moved to iView Media Pro, which has killer asset management facilities, but severely lacks even semi-serious photo editing facilities. The services it provides are elementary at best. I started a quest for its replacement and wound up with Aperture 1.5.
Along the way to Aperture, I stopped at Adobe Lightroom Public Beta 4. While thoroughly impressed with both (it's practically a coin toss), they both have a severe deficiency; lacking support for video file management. Most cameras these days shoot video, and the thought of having to manage video separately from still shots is beyond me. iView Media Pro has done this since day one, and I'm really bummed that the new wave of DAM products are leaving it out. I get that serious photogs don't mess with video necessarily, but if the DAM applications want exposure to a massive marketplace (the semi-pro/amateur photog) all they have to do is add support for video management. To be clear I'm not suggesting video editing facilities be incorporated into modern DAMs (although that would be nice), just that managing video file location alongside my pics be part of the feature set.
Easy to do, and opens the apps up to a whole new tier of consumer.
I can hear the Product Managers for Aperture and Lightroom scoffing at the suggestion that their apps be used by non-pros. Just add video file location management (and allow importing of said files) and I'd be happy; am I asking that much?
Tags: DAM