That’s always been Photolab’s future with you Colin. Second-fiddle to Lightroom. If Adobe were attempting to sabotage the DxO community forums, they couldn’t invent a better mole.
Any DAM (there’s nothing even close to DAM in Photolab 4 – it’s an underfeatured and slow image browser), even if it’s released in Photolab 5 will not be production ready for another three to five years. DAM is hard. Cross-platform DAM is even harder. Photo Mechanic has been working on DAM for twenty years and there are still issues. Same applies to iMatch, Photo Supreme and CaptureOne. C1 is on the third version of their DAM now and none of them work well. Skylum entirely failed with their DAM in Luminar and ended up not releasing it at all (promising a DAM as a feature but instead offered a poor quality image browser).
Photolab’s selling points are two-fold:
- the quality of the lens database and optical corrections
- best in class noise reduction (by a long way)
Bonus points are:
- fast workflow with U-point quick masking
- very attractive design and workflow
What should be a selling point but DxO are self-sabotaging this point is cross-compatibility with other professional photo software. The problem areas are incomplete XMP support for metadata (storing some in the database or in .dop files, not passing it all through perfectly) and with failure of Nik 4 to play well with Photoshop CS6, Affinity Photo and C1 and other hosts.
Nobody is buying Photolab as a DAM. Improve the image browser, sure, so that it’s possible to do triage quickly and efficiently in Photolab at least for small sets. It’s a long way from there (and we’re not there yet) to a reliable, fast, powerful and capable DAM. The other companies in the space are delighted to watch DxO release an underfeatured DAM which can be pilloried in DP Review and elsewhere (and by Colin) as “far inferior to the DAM tools in Lightroom”.
In terms of marketing, DxO should be as quiet as possible about DAM as a talking or selling point and focus on ideal lens correction, invisible noise reduction and fastest full workflow with lens correction, local adjustments and noise reduction. Plays extremely well with all other pro photo software (DAM, HDR merge tools, bitmap editors, panorama programs).
That’s a profile which would lure in existing pro users of other software. Where the pros go, high end amateur photographers eventually follow.
Mass market is at a different price point (Skylum, OnOne1, Photoshop Elements serve this market) with a different depth of tool (I’ve just been improving my own gradient work this past six months with Photolab local adjustments and I’ve been using Photolab for three years).