The one and only true reason for a DAM is to find the images you want to find.
Wether that means micro-tagging or no organisation at all is a personal choice.
In almost 20 years I am now on my 5th major Raw-Editor and the only problems I ever had were when I thought I needed to rely on some database centered application. No matter how you look at it, that database application will be obsolete at some point. But your images will hopefully live much longer than that.
I have since switched to using my own simplified system and it let’s me find images in no time while being very future proof. Flat textfiles for the win.
There is a folder structure
YEAR/PROJECT/Subfolders/
then I fill in a few metadata fields:
- TransmissionReference
- Country / Region / City
- Keywords that describe the content in broad terms (e.g. landscape, mountain, lake, tree, …)
and I have a script that extracts that information per project into a simple textfile each where I can grep through them. Very effective, super fast, pretty much no maintenance. The “database” needs no migration, can not corrupt, etc pp.
And darktable? Used for tagging and editing, but images are usually only a few hours imported, then I remove them all again. If I edit a folder in RawTherapee or with some Adobe App at a customer I don’t have to sweat anything, the system stays the same.
PS: The only problem I still have not solved due to time-constraints is transferring metadata and keywords from one editor so another editor can work with them. Talking about standards.
So the missing darktable feature I would complain about is that dt does not write the metadata back into the plain “Adobe” xmp files for everyone else to consume. One of these days I’ll sit down and fire up that Python XMP Toolkit and get it done outside of dt.
Soon™.