Demoing DxO PhotoLab 9 and not seeing anything like Albums or Galleries.
An album would be a group of selected photos that you can reorganize in any order. Albums could be organized in hierarchical structure. New photos can be added to Albums and removed from Albums.
Does this exist. I’m probably missing it. I searched on Album, Gallery, organize and didn’t find anything in the manual.
Photo lab uses folders only, but you can create Projects and place selected images into them.
From the PhotoLibrary tab you can search for camera, lenses, shutter speed and other EXIF/IPTC data.
Keywords are also available but I found that putting decent information into IPTC works well if I need to find certain images quickly.
PhotoLab is highly competent RAW developer but with very limited DAM functionality.
For better organisational tools, a real DAM application is recommended, like PhotoSupreme, digiKam, iMatch, ACDSee, MediaPro etc.
Not in PhotoLab. You’ll need a specific DAM for that kind of functionality.
@MtnBiker Welcome to the forum with respect to your query as @LVS stated there are ‘Projects’ withinPL9 but they are only held in the database.
Hence, lose/delete the database and you have lost your ‘Projects’! No data about what ‘Project(s) an image belonged to, or its position within that @project’, are held outside the database.!
Projects can be organized in a hierarchy and images can be added and removed from a ‘Project’ at any time and can belong to as many ‘Projects’ as you need. But it does not appear that you can change the order of presentation of the images within a ‘Project’ according to what I just tried.
You can sort and filter images based on much the same criteria that you can sort them when viewing the original Folder.
But you do not appear to be able to Drag & Drop the images from one location to another within a project but you can drag and drop from one project or folder to another project.
@Required and @Fineus the “obsession” that the “DAM” functions are simply absent from PhotoLab are overstated. I am “cross” that the amount of effort to improve the existing “DAM” features is not that great but DxO “resist” any urge to finish the job they started.
But the users found fault and DxO lost interest so we are where we are, but, within limitations, some of which may be shared by more heavyweight DAM software, i.e. have you checked that the limitation I have outlined above is not present in the DAM packages suggested @Required, it might do what @MtnBiker wants/needs.
For the record I have a licensed copy of IMatch but tend to find some of it overkill and DigiKam resides on one machine or another of mine and holds most of my images excluding 2025!
Thanks all for answering.
I am using Mylio which has pretty good DAM capabilities but infuriating in many other ways particularly since they don’t respect the MacOS design. Not so good in photo editing. DxO PL is far superior, but I go back and forth organizing and editing so want an app that does that better. I’m not asking for recommendations here though. I saw many of the apps mentioned already that I had explored in the past. I am using Pixelmator for photo editing and until Apple messes it up will continue with that combo.
