I had tried Daminion few days ago and didn't like three things:

• No configuration at all.

-fenixproductions (March 05, 2012, 05:24 PM)

This is something that can implement in the future, but at the moment we would like to polish the default UI, like any web-service.

• For my 200MB cliparts folder it created 90MB hidden directory full of thumbnails.

We keep this approach for the following reasons:
1. Catalog (SQLite database) size is smaller;
2. You can select to backup your catalog with or without thumbnails. Because thumbnails are something that could be regenerated later, from actual files;
3. The performance of loading thumbnails from files is better than loading from the database.

No warning before any changes or edits buffering. I had wanted to test it on my photos folder and I am lucky I did not. It would mess up my existing tags completely.

May be "Auto-Sync Tags with Metadata" feature should be turned off by default?

The catalog generated is small (only 55MB vs 5GB for exifPro) but is taking a very long time to load after updating to the latest beta - just finished after perhaps 2 or 3 minutes.

-Darwin (March 05, 2012, 01:31 PM)

After upgrading Daminion might to upgrade your catalog (database) sometimes to a new version. And this might require a few minutes.

Hi there,

My name is Murat Korkmazov, I am co-founder of Daminion Software. I appreciate for everyone here who evaluated our Daminion.

The price: Daminion Standalone will be free of charge up to 0.99 version. After that the program will be commercial (something between $99-199). But it's not a problem to provide the early adopters by free licenses in exchange to helping us with product testing and/or promotion the program (like blog posts, of forum posts).

We are not affiliated with MasRizal, I never heard about this company before. Probably you know our PicaJet – the simple photo organizer (we released PicaJet - 4 months later after Picasa was launched). Daminion is a brand new version of the PicaJet, and it was developed based on huge feedbacks from PicaJet users since 2004. 

There is some delay when your first open a catalog, but as joiwind said: "once the program is running it takes 1-2 seconds to open a catalog". Once we'll implement some core functionality of the product we'll start to optimize the performance of Daminion.