I appreciate that RT does one thing and one thing well, process raw images. I’ve been using it for ages now and my general workflow is on returning with photos on the camera, copy all files to the NAS under a fairly straightfoward directory layout, ie year/month/date-with-description, ie 2016/March/30-Milkyway-Tidbinbilla.
I then open the folder up in RT and using the Browser increase the thumbnail size and quickly rate the photos, 1 star mostly and the trash can for the ones to delete.
With that done I’ll filter on 1 star and edit, grab all and send to the queue for processing.
What I really need to do though is keyword and rate in a DAM. Now I spent a fair bit of time with digikam, and to be honest I found that it’s rather powerful but it was making me move away from RT as I was never able to get it to integrate well. My preference will be to remain with RT for raw processing. Worse on Windows, digikam stopped working and I lost the ability to keyword in the GUI.
So it got me to thinking, are there any lightweight DAM applications out there that don’t bring with it all the bells and whistles of digikam. If my preference is to use my own raw processor, I don’t need the editing capabilities of digikam. The problem is, digikam is quite good, when it works, and any attempt to do something lightweight would end up becoming more heavier as capabilities similar to digikam continue to get included.
I’m also remaining on windows for some time, so something that works on both windows and Linux is where I’m at.
I am tempted to make a start on a lightweight DAM in C#, but need to start looking into what raw support and C# bindings are available in the various open source raw libraries, like ufraw etc…
What do people use for their DAM, are there other options out there other than digikam and have you started your own DAM project?