DAM - Which one are you using?

[elianoimperato]

Hello everyone,

I'm a photojournalist, I'm a long-time Photo Mechanic user. I upgraded to Photo Mechanic 6 Plus as soon as it was presented and I used it as my DAM. Now that Camera Bits decided to not support it anymore I need to find a good solution. I don't like the idea to use Lightroom Classic because with its previews system the catalog size is growing very much.

Which DAM are you using?

Thank you,

eliano

[pearcie]

Hi
For Mac users I can recommend NeoFinder - https://www.cdfinder.de/index.html.
It works really well with PM.
I use the standard version.

There is also a Windows version - https://www.abemeda.com/

Gary

[myotis]

I would also suggest Neofinder, low cost, very powerful, and excellent technical support.

[carlseibert]

FWIW, I'm testing NeoFinder and thus far I'm impressed. Impressed as in it seems to work, which is not to say it's as good as PM+ but it seems to be a damn sight better than the other non-PM+ photographers' DAMs that I've tried.

And to the OP's concern, as far as I can tell yet, Neofinder's database files are pretty small. I'm looking at about 3 GB for about 150,000 images. Now maybe the Mac Finder is mis-reporting the file size. That's happened. Google says the thumbnails are embedded right in the db files. Google's never wrong, right?

For contrast, a copy of my old Photo Mechanic Plus catalog folder totals some 23 GB. I cannot guarantee that this is an apples-to-apples (sorry for the pun) comparison.

Phorto Mechanic Plus wrote all your metadata to your files, so migrating to another DAM should be as simple as scanning your directory tree into the new DAM. The only data that I can think of that you will lose is collections membership. If that matters, if you haven't already done this, and if you still have access to your PM+ catalog, you can call up collections that you want to keep and write a keyword unique to the collection into each file's Keywords field. Search for that keyword in the new DAM and you'll see the collection.

Oh yeah, you'll lose the ability to browse keywords hierarchically. (AFAIK) Which is no loss. You won't lose any ability to successfully search for assets. Readers of my blog will know what I have always thought about that subject. The TLDR: of which is that I think it's one of the dumbest ideas ever to come out of Adobe - and that bar is pretty high.

[Stephen_C]

For what it's worth, I've also used Photo Mechanic Plus since it was first in beta but have now moved to NeoFinder (running on macOS 26.4). I do find NeoFinder really good (and fast—although I have only about 21,000 photos in it at present) and it was quite easy to set up an Alfred workflow (using a little AppleScript, which NeoFinder supports) to search my NeoFinder catalogues.

Stephen

[Skids]

I have been using NeoFinder for the past eighteen months and agree thats its a very useful tool for cataloging images and for that matter any other media.  One great strength is that it can be controlled with Applescript.  One minor issue is that I find the text used in the UI to be rather small but that is probably just me.  Another strength is that it is great value for money so well worth a punt.

[SamFrost]

it was quite easy to set up an Alfred workflow (using a little AppleScript, which NeoFinder supports) to search my NeoFinder catalogues.

Thanks for this tip - really useful! I am trialling Neofinder now and am quite happy with it so far.

To follow up, do you know if there is a way to make the PM contextual menu item appear in Neofinder, so that once I've found an image or folder using Neofinder I can ctrl-click it and go straight to a PM contact sheet?

[pearcie]

Hi
Just watched carlseibert videos about NeoFinder on YouTube.
On a Mac you can just drag image to PM icon in dock and it takes you to the PM contact sheet the image is in
Gary

[pearcie]

I've tried using Automator on my Mac to add an 'Open in PM' option in services but to no avail.

However I have been able to add an AppleScript in Neofinder which does work;

tell application "NeoFinder"
   set sel to selected items
   if sel is not {} then
      set filepath to finder path of item 1 of sel
      tell application "Photo Mechanic 6"
         activate
         open filepath
      end tell
   end if
end tell

Probably just as easy to drag and drop chosen image to dock!
gary

[Skids]

I have been using NeoFinder for the past eighteen months and agree thats its a very useful tool for cataloging images and for that matter any other media.  One great strength is that it can be controlled with Applescript.  One minor issue is that I find the text used in the UI to be rather small but that is probably just me.  Another strength is that it is great value for money so well worth a punt.

Unfortunately I need to withdraw my recommendation for the time being:  I have discovered a number of instances where NeoFinder has incorrectly edited an xmp sidecar file when it should have embedded the metadata into a jpeg or DNG file.  The issue seems to occur when the sidecar has been created outside of NeoFinder and has not set these two tags:

<photoshop:SidecarForExtension>JPG</photoshop:SidecarForExtension>
<crs:RawFileName>2025-11-05_144506_PB050187.JPG</crs:RawFileName>

The lines were taken from an xmp sidecar that should relate to an RW2 raw file.  It appears that NeoFinder has added these tags which mean the file refers to the jpeg copy of the file rather than the raw source file.  It seems that NeoFinder does not honour the convention that xmp sidecar refers to a camera raw of the same root name (less extension).  The upshot is that the jpeg does not contain the embedded meta data and the raw file has no associated metadata when viewed from outside NeoFinder.

Please be aware that working out what has happened is not straight forward and I may have made an error but please exercise caution when using NeoFinder to add keywords etc to jpeg raw pairs.

Skids

[Stephen_C]

please exercise caution when using NeoFinder to add keywords etc to jpeg raw pairs

Although I don't use JPEG/RAW pairs (but RAW only) I've found the developer of NeoFinder responsive so hope that you're able to raise the matter with him.

Stephen

[carlseibert]

Actually, the bug Skids is talking about is a bit worse. If you edit metadata on the JPEG half of a RAW-JPEG pair, you end up with no edited metadata on the JPEG and the edits intended for the JPEG applied to the RAW. (The latter might or might not be a bad thing, but still.)

So, until the bug is fixed, don't try to edit metadata on RAW-JPEG pairs in NeoFinder.

We all have Photo Mechanic at our fingertips, so we don't have to use NeoFinder for this at all. Photo Mechanic is a bunch more powerful and I'm fairly sure I know how to use it, so there's a decent argument for just using PM for all metadata editing from the word go.

That said, I'm enjoying NeoFinder in day to day use. It's fast and streamlined. In the month or so that I've been using it, I've had to do the fancy kind of searching that I made those workarounds about maybe once. Or twice. And I got the job done.

To put the bug thing in perspective. There was a time when a fair part of earning my living involved finding bugs. I'm pretty decent at it. The fact that I found some (three, one puts data at risk) in this product (plus the ugly one that Simon found.) is cause for appropriate concern, but I wouldn't think is cause for panic. I could probably find that many bugs in Photoshop or any of the big, fancy, supposedly highly polished software, in a day.

But Photo Mechanic doesn't have bugs like that!? I've said before and I'll say again that Photo Mechanic may well be the cleanest software I've ever used. I'm not entirely sure that I've ever reported a legit bug in the 25+ years that I've used it. So I think it wouldn't be a fair comparison to hold impose Photo Mechanic as a minimum standard for code from other small developers. You may have noticed that Photo Mechanic costs more than other products in its segment and NeoFinder is an absolute screaming deal. That's is no doubt related.

-Carl