I’m happy to be wrong for once. I worried this would be time wasted and even destructive. Instead the metadata features in PhotoLab 5 do work and I will find them useful. If they had come a year earlier, I probably would not have invested in PhotoMechanic. The Plus part of PhotoMechanic still offers a catalogue like no other (one can search instantly on any dates, any camera, any lens, any file size, any keyword and all at once, across hundreds of thousands of image files).
What’s wonderful here is that DxO did not push us into a database only model or that wretched sessions model that C1 pushes on us. Just the frustration with bringing a folder of images into C1 and out has stopped me from putting the time in on C1. After losing Aperture to Apple’s whims, iView Media to Microsoft’s incompetence and PhaseOne’s neglect and Lightroom to Adobe’s greed, I’m not at all interested in having another company try to take over my image library. It’s well-structured OS level files and folders from here on in.
I’m okay with where we are in terms of a fast image editor which does not attempt to fully replace the bitmap editor. It’s more than possible to take an almost finished image into Affinity Photo for subtle dodge and burn and layer work. The work has to be pretty subtle now to require more than the chroma and luminance selectors we now have.
Some people say PhotoLab 5 is only a small incremental improvement. No, it’s an amazing new version. Having control over every U-point mask with both chroma and luma sliders changes what we can do. Control lines make gradient work so much better. And we’re just getting started learning how to use them.
And I’m delighted to be able to add metadata as I go and not as a separate process.
Note: I am not at all okay with DxO pushing us out of recent OS versions because they are just too lazy to support more than two versions of the OS (it means building on more than one Mac). Switching OS now has cost me north of fifty hours which otherwise could have been spent on billable or creative work. Putting those hours in now does nothing to save me from having to do it again later. I was much happier only putting those hours in every three years not every year.
Cue Joanna to come in with a bunch of technogabble how only the most recent shared software libraries can do anything. Is it an attempt to present herself as an insider while reciting the most pedestrian Apple press release nonsense. Can’t figure out her motivation here, surely she can’t receive a commission for every Mac sold in Europe? Ah yes, it’s a justification for the fact that her keyword program (now more or less made obsolete by the metadata features in PhotoLab 5) can’t run on anything earlier than Big Sur.
And no, performance of PhotoLab 4 and PhotoLab 5 for a Radeon equipped Intel Mac under Big Sur is absolutely the same. Just the same as PhotoLab 4 under Mojave. There was no optimisation done for these computers and no need to exclude Mojave except laziness to compile PhotoLab 5 on a Catalina Xcode instead of Big Sur Xcode. It’s a kick in the stomach to loyal DxO customers and PhotoLab advocates.