My DAM is something I wrote myself, which only deals with keywords, Finder tags, star ratings and descriptions. It doesn’t use a database, or should I say its own database. Instead, it uses the Spotlight indexing and searching system provided by macOS and everything gets written directly to the metadata of RAW files by my DAM which, in turn, gets indexed by Spotlight, so I don’t even have to worry about XMP sidecars either.
It also means I don’t need any third party app to find files because I can use Finder’s Spotlight search to retrieve files by any of the many metadata tags that Spotlight indexes.
It would be nice; but coming from a software development background I know firsthand the enormous resources required… In addition, the photographic segment is super competitive… If I was DXO, I would be asking, are you prepared to pay for development tutorials?
One more thing about relying on the database vs, relying on .dop sidecar files:
Sidecar files store image development settings as well as some metadata. As far as I checked it, development data is complete, while metadata stored in .dop files is a subset of what is stored in the database. What is contained in that subset also depends on whether DPL for Mac or Win was used. Only the database contains the full set, but it is still different between Mac and Win versions.
App settings like the window size and others, custom presets and profiles as well as DxO optical modules are stored in different places, some of which can be set by the user.
Backing up all these things for security/reliability reasons is best left to a backup service like Time Machine. Backing up these things in the sense of synchronising DPL on different computers represents a different challenge though.
There is no “one size fits all” solution for all possible backup and/or synchronising requirements., and sadly, DxO has turned a blind eye on such things (and others).
