I'm in the process of setting up my first DAM-based workflow to get a handle on my ten years worth of digital photos. I'm reading the DAM book presently, and looking around for information on the current crop of software to base my flow around. I've been shooting Nikon RAW for three years now, and just moved up from Bibble Pro 4 to version 5. It's taking me some time to get that set up; I'm presently only using it in a Bibble 4 manner.
Initially, it seemed like DNG was a great way to go on the way into Bibble. However, reading about (the lack of) generic DNG support in Bibble in their formus, their position is that converting NEF to DNG will result in the loss of several camera-specific features they provide so (at least as of Dec 2009) they had no plans to add such support. So it appears that if I'm going to stick with Bibble, I won't be using a DNG-based flow.
Reading more, I've found two workable flows; XMP sidecar files, and PM writing IPTC back to my NEF files. Now this latter possibility had never occurred to me, as I had read that the closed nature of the proprietary formats meant writing to these files was a great way to lose information. But it appears PM does it, so it must be pretty safe. Can you fill me in on this feature, and any pros/cons to going this route?
If this is covered somewhere in the docs or in a post on the forums, I apologize; I did look around and do some searching first before posting. Just point me at it.
Thanks!
