Phototheca

Once again I find my confidence in Adobe shaken, this seems to be a more common occurrence than being impressed by their efforts, indeed it seems to me that over the last couple of years Adobe have been a driving force behind improving products for half a dozen other image editing products because Adobe have decided to shy away from the non professional market. Their choice, seems short sighted to me but if you have a pigeon that needs holing feel free.

As a result I have been looking for a Digital Asset Management tool because there are plenty of excellent image editing products out there, I am currently experimenting with DxO, I've repeatedly tried Olympus' own product (it's appalling, no two ways about that, Windows 3.1 style and performance, come on a bit of basic design and a half way decent programmer would sort that) and I've been having some time with Darktable. That is an interesting program because whilst it is miles off on look and feel the jpg files it generates are fantastic, I had no idea that all programs were not created equal on that front.

So DAM software :

• Digikam, conceptually excellent, on Windows it's clunky and doesn't write standard format tags which is pretty pointless. 
• Picasa, it still works, tags work fine but location tagging has stopped working.
• PhotoTheca, I rather liked the look of this product but the free version has a 5,000 photo limit and the first folder I tried to experiment on have just over 1,000 files and the program tried to only load around half of those and then crashed.
• Lightroom, much as really dislike adobe nowadays and keywords are dog slow to add and geo tagging has stopped working on my version it is still the only DAM I have found that is remotely respectable at the moment.