Make Projects more Robust

DxO PhotoLab Feature requests
1

Currently, projects are incredibly fragile and break when images are moved outside of PhotoLab. To improve this, do the following:

  1. add a ‘locate’ function to relocate moved images. As with LrC and COP, this should smartly check for other missing images in the same folder when one is recovered.

  2. on macOS, make the database more robust by storing file references, rather than file names. This will allow the OS to track renaming/moving (but not copying, unfortunately), reducing the number of breakages.

  3. Fix the undo system! It is 2024 not 1994, and undo should revert the last user action, which includes actions that modify projects.

  4. Add an option to manually re-order images in a project, to allow proper sequencing.

  5. Add an option to keep backups of projects in an equivalent of a .dop file. At present, if the database is corrupted or deleted, the projects are completely lost.

  6. Add the ability to mark a ‘target’ project and a keyboard short-cut to add images to the target. When you have many projects, this will be less error prone than drag-and-drop or trying to find the right project in the contextual menu (see also ‘undo’).

As it stands, projects are pretty much useless for anything serious. It seems odd to add a DAM feature like this but then simply abandon it. As it stands, it adds a maintenance/test cost but does not deliver anything useful that can not be done better via the Finder and a folder with copies/aliases of images.

2

I agree on everything you mentioned, but am also under the impression: a majority of PL users either doesn’t like DAMs, or have their own holy workflows and workarounds. I also regret PL lacks many basic functions of a DAM, starting with stability and not ending with usability, but am afraid that this will remain DxO’s maximum effort.

1 Like
3

There’s more than one feature request that asks for improved DAM functionalities.

This one takes you to a series of posts that might be interesting to read.

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4

Yes, I know. However, I wanted to give a list of concrete things that would improve the situation, particularly since none of these is particularly difficult.

The way undo works (doesn’t work!) is particularly frustrating. Even the most basic applications manage to implement undo the way that a user reasonably expects it to work,. I do not understand why PL is the outlier here.

5

Re: item #1… I had this issue yesterday, right clicked on the missing image and selected “Fix Image Path.” When I updated to the new location, it not only fixed that file but also all others within the project which were in the same missing folder. For me, it worked better than expected. Did you have a different functionality in mind?

Agree with your larger points though. I don’t want/expect PL7 to be a DAM that tries to offer every feature, but some simple updates to the projects (smart projects, manual sequencing, for example) would go a long way IMO to make PL7 more of an all-in-one solution.