I agree with that.
Anyone know what the backlog contains ?
Now that is a deep question. 
I guess a simple way to discover that is to look at the topics posted to the “Which feature do you need?” subcategory under “DxO PhotoLab” here. Any post from DxO Staff (particularly Svetlana G. and Steven L.) will likely indicate if it’s in the backlog or not. Happy searching! (It’s not that hard, fortunately.)
and I have some old bugs I had been told by support were to be fixed, most never have.
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Great poll… I agree… but I guess before everything gets fixed we will get a new UI so everything will get fixed one time only 
Hey Franky,
I hope all the stuff you wrote down and collect in the one post you have started, and I forgot which one it is 
I think I’m also influenced with the “forgotten virus” of the DXO empirium 
I started several of them including that of the differences between the Windows and mac versions, here
But also:
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#1 Bug fixes in point updates to PL6.
#2 Robustness in PL7. Add all the “you should be able to…” bits to existing features.
For #2, my list would include the ability to re-order watermark presets and export presets, for example. Another big one could be to improve the basic UI for readability.
Great idea… but you’re kidding, right?
Let’s think about a DXO product manager’s goals. They do not include a fully mature, carefully-tuned, deeply-functional, all-round-great, raw-developer: the BBEdit of raw development environments.
That’s on the top of OUR list; not theirs.
Their list is much simpler: sell more copies of PhotoLab next year in a competitive environment that is dominated by “innovation” and, um… “splash”.
Although I’m sure (no, I’m not) that DXO loves the regulars on this forum and holds their opinions and wishes dear (bet they don’t), it would be a safe bet that “Clear Vision Plus XR [x-ray]” and “DXO Smart Lighting AI” are at the head of the Memo that Product/Marketing has already sent to the CEO/CTO.
You’re all going to buy Version 7 even with those “so-called bugs”. So suck it up, kids.
Your pal, The Grinch.
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Lightroom was reprogramed one year and that was when it was a yearly program. Like PL it had built up years of bugs and was much faster after the new version. I expect there is a large part of the PL code that no one knows how it works or even what it does, most programs go like it as programers move on. It could be as with Lightroom a time when redoing the program IS the big sales attraction.
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I’m sort of thinking “but DxO doesn’t make a turnaround of 4 billions/year”. Also, can’t help it and don’t take it bad (at least not worse than anytime): when I look around in the forum, the average age of DxO customers doesn’t promise very open minds (or daring courage) to changes in anything “used to be so for years, so why change it?” 
I like your statement @PeterGallagher and just like to add: the DxO managers just need to keep the EA troop busy and happy to investigate new bugs. So there are two main groups: the deep diving alpha testers as volunteers and sort of “alternative quality lab on unpaid basis” and the investors (with a big overlap between the two). It’s kind of an adventure playground for the young at heart. 
Edit: 2 typos corrected
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The problem in photography is the age of those doing it has always been high, family commitments cause people to drop out and fallowed by a minority returning latter. It is also expensive, the cheaper ranges have been replaced by phones so there is a mass phone use and an increasingly small camera one. This is the problem DxO refuses to face as its one that is at both ends of the camera use range, people moving up from phones I think will stay with with programs that work with there phone as well as cameras. Then there are these with cameras moving onto phones either as well as or in some cases age related enforcement (my wife can’t carry a camera now). It a declining market for cameras and an aging one so in many ways the age of the four users reflects this and the loss of phone support incress this problem for DxO.
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The phone support or the lack of in PL - is it really a problem for a wide range of phone users who harvest their apps in the various app stores, not bothering about RAW? Or is it something for more experienced photogs who like their RAW developers (take your pick) and want just from time to time do something with their phone pics? For a filter-based phone-photo improvement app PL is too expensive and (worse) too much effort to learn.
Therefore I don’t understand the wish for phone support in PL. Like I don’t understand Greek or Portuguese. I think PL users are the workarounders amongst all other RAW developer clients and used to special apps for everyting?
Phone support, i don’t know when you use the phone’s equivilence of Rawfile the optical corrections and stacked images which are HUGHE in combined lenses phone’s use these day’s are already applied in the phone rawfile.
If so then it’s “easy” to support a phone format. No additional optical corrections based on labtesting needed only HQ denoising, prime is probably to difficult to implement.
I gues that most are happy if they can use the phone rawfiles and run there flavor over it in dxo pl on pixel based files. Instead of using cooked oop-jpeg’s and alter those.
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I’m one of them, I moved from cheap 35mm cameras to Canon digital full frame. But nothing in between except rising family and working. I still have 5 bodies, multiple lenses including 400 and 500mm big white lenses. In early 70s started to use Sony a6000 along with the bird lenses, nearly 80 now and moving over to a 22 Ultra phone for much of the time as much more convenient than 2 cameras and lenses.
Go to my family, both sons used cameras; one did event photography for a time. Now neither of them have cameras, both use phones. The former event photography one uses RAW and processes it the other snaps. If he moves back to a camera latter will he switch programs away from the one he uses for his phone RAW now? If I learn, as I am having, to use Affinity for my DNGs will I begin to think is it worth having two workflows and remember how to use two different program (god it does become amazingly frustrating as you age to adapt to these things (I could program Access at work now what is it)). Its these realities DxO has to face there are lots of Affinity users processing phone RAWs, Apple and Android, I bet it even more using the dreaded Lightroom. There are NON in PL as they refuse to support them, the few younger ones who move to cameras most will largely stay with what they are using the and many older (found an amazing number of us in forums) former PL users driven away.
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I am not optimistic about the future of PhotoLab. In recent months, the DXO team has been practically absent from this forum. The new equipment is supported with a huge delay (I waited half a year for RAW support for MAVIC 3, there is no RAW support for action cameras). Whether we like it or not, the photography market is changing and I increasingly feel that DXO does not have a realistic view of her.
Photolab is not attractive to professional photographers (who shoot for money full time), until developers figure out why, PhotoLab’s market share won’t increase. And with this market share, nothing will improve.
My advice is - stop the development of the companion products and start working intensively on PhotoLab 7 right now! You don’t have a resource for either PureRaw, ViewPoint, Filmpack, or NIK collection. Without photolab, these apps will have negligible market share, especially among young photographers who are primarily driven by the factor of how much more money can be made per unit of time.
The current logic - at the beginning of the year we release a small update to PureRAW, then to Nik, sometimes to ViewPoint and Filmpack, and in October the new version of PhotoLab will not work for much longer. Too much work for too small a team!
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Although I generally agree with you @Joanna, I can already see the comments coming next year:
- Is this all? Where is feature XYZ that product ABC already has?
- I don’t see a point in upgrading as it has nothing new
Etc.
All those comments have been made after the release of PL6 as well and PL6 did incorporate new features such as DeepPrime XD and the new Retouch.
And a relatively small product (when it comes to userbase) such as Photolab can’t afford to not come up with new features as that would make them lose the competition. They should, however, prioritize new features based on what customers request, not on what the development teams think users want. In other words: look at the business value.
And to nitpick a bit from an Agile point of view: a backlog also contains the new features. Not only bug fixes and improvements
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It would achieve one more sale it hasn’t got this year. Might as well have a subscription plan if they’re going to ‘sell’ you a new version each year.
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Have to agree. If they’re going to ‘sell’ a new version each year, they may as well make it subscription based.
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No thanks. Nobody is twisting our arms to upgrade (every year). Still the big issue is that DxO doesn’t allow upgrade pricing beyond a single version. I.e. if we skipped PhotoLab 5, we better upgrade to PhotoLab 6, otherwise our licenses are dead.
Oh, and don’t forget that DxO is now kindly removing our legacy licenses for older versions and killing our legacy serial numbers when we upgrade. This means if we have to install an older version for any reason, it will be either impossible or incredibly painful.
Actually, the latest word is that we can skip one version. The advantage of the non-subscription model is that my copies of PL1 through to PL5 all still work fine.