Daminion another management software
After taking a look into the relativly new IMatch5 version, it’s only consequent to take another manageing software into focus. This is Daminion, another representative of DAM software.
Introduction
The DAM software Daminion is available as a server and a standalone version. The standalone version is available as a free of charge version, which is limited to 15.000 images, and software to buy with limits from 25.000,75.000 and a unlimited number of images. The price for the unlimited version is almost the same as for the IMatch5 software. The most recent version as of July 2014 is 3.3. If you only have to deal with a maximum of 15.000 images Daminion is free of charge, but in any case you can try this version before you going to buy it.
Installation and usage
The installation is simple and fast. After the installation a catalogue is generated and you can start right away to import your images. Like in the article for IMatch5 i used the same folders with round about 1000 images to import.
On the right hand side you’ll find the different questionaires to the database, the center contains the preview window for the images and on the left hand side you’ll find the windows for the metadata including a map viewer for the selected image.
From the estimated 1000 images there are 2 folders with XMP sidecar files, which were generated by Lightroom. And very positive keywords and catageories are taken over into the database. Even the star labels from Lightroom are taken over. Only the color labels were missing. But those could be generated, because in my workflow the different color labels represent the different keywords like ‘published’,’keywords added’ and so on.
Of course Daminion defines automatically different categories from the metadata, to sort the images by capture date, used lens or ISO setting.
The categories are highly adaptable, so you can group your images by project or customer or any other keyword.
According the website Daminion can handle XMP and also EXIF/IPTC metadata. Handling means that Daminion is able to write those data. If you plan to change to Daminion it is essential that the software is able the XMP files and that keywords and labels are imported correctly into the database.
Daminion is of course able to pass a selected image to a image processing software. During installation the Daminion installer regognized Irfanview and Photoshop as possible alternatives.
But you can add other software like DxO or RAWTherapee as a image processor.
Conclusion
Daminion is a sophisticated tool and using the version to bay, you can manage even pretty big image collections. It is scalable to the server variant with concurrent access to the images making it interessting for little studios.
Like with IMatch you can read the XMP sidecar files into the database, so in case of a change to this software coming from Lightroom, manuall correction should occur not too often.
The prices for non server licenses are adequate. Having to choose i don’t know which one i would prefer.
Do you use Dominion or what do think about DAM software in generall? I’m looking forward to your comments and questions.
ciao tuxoche
