Anyone testing Daminion Media Manager ?

[joiwind]

Is anyone testing Daminion ?
It is in beta so is still rather unsteady but it looks good so far - any comments ?
(I have no relation with the company !)

[Curt]

foresee that the final versions (most likely) will be shareware only.

No, I am not testing it. I merely installed it to have a look, and then removed it again.

[JavaJones]

It looks promising but the lack of info on future pricing also puts me off.

- Oshyan

[joiwind]

Well I checked with the developer Murat H. Korkmazov and he said this :

"We plan to release 3 editions of the Daminion Standalone

Daminion Free - $0
Daminion Std - $99 US
Daminion Pro - $199 US"

I don't yet know the differences between the versions.

[Curt]

I *know* nothing about this, but I *feel* it is likely that Daminion is based upon a program that used to be made by MasRizal - because it is no longer on their site. Their prices also used to be identical to the ones you quoted.

[40hz]

So much for your "free lifetime upgrade" from MasRizal if that's the case right?

[Curt]

-yes, that seems to be the case. I couldn't find any updates from after 2009.
Edited:
But if they have sold the program, their own 'death' may of course not have any impact on Daminion.

[joiwind]

Still testing and it's looking good - to me anyway.

I'm waiting to hear from the dev about the different versions.

The only drawback that I've found so far is that it takes a while, maybe 30 seconds to load the catalog (testing with +/- 500 jpegs) when you open the program.

[JavaJones]

If it takes that long to load the catalog with only 500 jpegs I wonder how it would respond to my 60,000+ photos, not to mention my other documents...

- Oshyan

[joiwind]

Here's what the dev's said :
"We are hard working to release the stable Daminion version. We'll release
the Daminion Server with multi-user capabilities very soon.

We haven't decided how we'll split the product's functionality across the
different versions yet. Our closest goals for the near future are to
continuously improve the Daminion Beta versions (that will be free of charge up
to 0.99)."

Rectification : the 30 second odd delay is only when you launch the program - once the program is running it takes 1-2 seconds to open a catalog, i.e. close a catalog and open another one. Testing with +/- 2000 jpegs.

This is a keeper for me but I won't keep going on about it... 

[JavaJones]

No, please, go on about it! I want to know more. Why is it a keeper? What else have you tried? Are you using it just for images (in which case have you tried e.g. IDimager), or other document types as well?

- Oshyan

[joiwind]

Well, Daminion seems a good attempt at what I want as a image organizer - I'm not saying it's the best because it's not, but I'll keep it to see how it develops - however it's a bit slow and sometimes takes a while to redraw thumbnails. One thing I like about it is the smallish db size and it not being java-based, also I very much like the ergonomic layout.
I've tried :
exifpro - don't like the layout
IDimager (not free)
and a few others which I won't mention as I find them lamentable. At the moment I'm testing :
Cloudatag which (although it comes from beyond the silk curtain) seems pretty good as a simple tagger and organizer, very fast and apparently stable but of course I don't use the remote cloud option,
and StudioLine PhotoBasic which is more powerful but looks promising.

As for your last question : "other document types...", I use Tag2Find (no longer developed) which is great for my vast collection of letters and docs but not for images as it does not integrate a viewer.

Thanks for your curiosity ... 

[JavaJones]

And thank you for the details. Definitely interesting as I am in a big "computer overhaul" phase and looking for ways to better catalog my vast quantities of *stuff*, hehe. Photo management seems like the best solved issue already, there are tons of good tools, from stand-alone DAM tools like IDimager and Daminion, to systems integrated with photo editors like Picasa or Lightroom (I favor the latter type). For general documents the landscape is less clear.

- Oshyan

[CWuestefeld]

I looked at this briefly, about a week ago, after seeing it recommended elsewhere. I didn't even bother to download, when I couldn't find a price tag mentioned anywhere.

The prices mentioned above seem pretty steep -- $100 - $200. That doesn't compare favorably with what are, in my mind, the other competitors: ACDSee ($70 - $240 for a well established, proven product), or photools.com's IMatch ($65, again, a well established program).

Looking at the Daminion web site, the product looks interesting, but I don't see anything compelling above what these other products offer. Does anyone have insight into its features?

[K.Murat]

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.

[Darwin]

Thanks, Murat! I'm testing the beta now - am posting in the "Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?" thread.

[Jibz]

Thanks, Murat! I'm testing the beta now - am posting in the "Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?" thread.

-Darwin (March 05, 2012, 01:47 PM)

I'm posting in that thread as well .

[K.Murat]

Welcome back to this thread

There were some Daminion related discussions on the neibour topic, but we received a suggestion to not hijacking that thread with a certain product specific questions.

So, I can proceed with answering to Daminion specific questions here.

[K.Murat]

I have 2881 SVG files which are mainly icons. Since there is no image organizer for vector files, I had decided to make mirrored directory with PNG versions of them. Simple batch script for rsvg-convert.exe did the work and I have few thousands thumbnails - 512 pixels wide. From my point of view it is now not worth it to have Daminion to offer thumbnails of my thumbnails. I don't know the code behind this software but for me: time saved on regenerating thumb for little bigger picture is lost on searching its entry in SQlite database + reading it from hidden dir. Please correct me on this
For bigger images it is OK but not for such case. It would be better to have an Option for setting minimum image size needed for thumbnails.

-fenixproductions (March 06, 2012, 03:46 PM)

I am not sure about the performance when we'll use PNG images instead of JPEG. Plus, we have 3 JPEG versions of the same file, for better performance. So if the thumbnail size will be minimal and there will be 100 thumbnails on the screen - the workspace rendering speed will be... so-so... for large PNG (500x500) rendering...

Anyway if we'll add support for SVG format, it might give you the same convenience as you converted your SVG collection to PNGs... Isn't it? So you don't need to convert each new SVG to PNG format.

BTW AFAIR some JPG files may contain embedded thumbnails already (in EXIF?). Does Daminion recreate thumb from bigger image to its own dir or use embedded one? How does it look like performance wise?

JPEG format allows to read the the actual files with 1:4, 1:8 scaling, that drastically improves the import speed. Exif allows storing thumbnails. But most of the digital cameras write very small size jpeg preview (120x80px) and with worst JPEG quality. And most software tools ignore this tag when updates JPEG or write to JPEG.

So Daminion do not use EXIF Thumbnail Tag to render images.

[Jibz]

Another little display glitch for you:

Find two images next to each other where one was taken with flash, the other without (i.e. one of them contains the Flash property under Image in the Properties pane, the other does not). Now, double-click the first to open full screen view, go to the next image, and close the full screen view again. Part of the Properties pane is now shifted to adjust for the missing Flash line, while the rest is not, resulting in something like this:



I think perhaps it would make more sense if pressing Ctrl-D in full screen mode would bring in the Properties pane for editing like in normal view instead of letting you edit the title at the top?

Btw, I realize this is not the ideal place for bug reports, would you prefer them on your forum or somewhere else?

[K.Murat]

I'm subscribed to new post notifications here but feel free to post on our forum also.

[tomos]

Btw, is Daminion non-destructive, as in, can I safely let it catalog my image folder without it writing EXIF data to all images or something sinister like that?

-Jibz (March 05, 2012, 08:59 AM)

You can do it via Sync button (on the toolbar) > "Turn Off Auto-Syncing Metadata".

-K.Murat (March 06, 2012, 01:39 AM)

not sure of the implications of this - in particular for photos that have not been catalogued at all ? but also in general - what exactly happens with this option turned on?
... so I turned it off for the moment.


On another note:
I know that preferences have not been implemented, but it would be nice to be able to choose where the catalogue folder is located. For me, I think it would be logical to have it on the same drive as the photos.
[edit] I see if I had read the help file, I would have known to import via the Startup Wizard (menu/Help) where I would have gotten an option to say where the catalogue files would be stored (defaults to My Documents). I imported by clicking on a button bottom left of window (above the Daminion "Tray") but dont think I got the option [edit]

[tomos]

I edited post above re importing files, but I also wanted to bump the question:

what are the implications (pros/cons) of turning on/off "Auto-Syncing Metadata"?
I presume,
for photos that have not been catalogued in another programme, it will only sync tags etc added manually in Daminion?

[Jibz]

what are the implications (pros/cons) of turning on/off "Auto-Syncing Metadata"?
I presume, for photos that have not been catalogued in another programme, it will only sync tags etc added manually in Daminion?

-tomos (March 26, 2012, 02:27 PM)

I am quite interested in this as well.

[joiwind]

what are the implications (pros/cons) of turning on/off "Auto-Syncing Metadata"?
I presume, for photos that have not been catalogued in another programme, it will only sync tags etc added manually in Daminion?

-tomos (March 26, 2012, 02:27 PM)

I am quite interested in this as well.

-Jibz (March 27, 2012, 03:31 AM)

Same here.