digital asset management software for photographers digital asset management software for photographers

THE BEST DIGITAL ASSET
MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

Adobe Bridge is a versatile tool that supports multiple file formats RAW, JPEG,
TIFF, PSD, and many others.The software contains all the needed functions like
convenient photo organization, backup options, HR features, seamless integration
with many other services, and more.

The best digital asset management software for photographers includes all the actions that you need to take to get the desired result, starting from shooting a picture.

DAM programs make it easier to transfer and rename your files, add metadata and keywords, filter and select images, edit and print photos, as well as create backup copies for additional cyber security.

Top 8 Photo Asset Management Programs for Professionals

  1. Adobe Bridge - Handy batch processing mode
  2. Adobe Lightroom Classic - Versatile option for photographers
  3. digiKam - For Linux owners
  4. ACDSee - Groups photos based on face recognition
  5. Photo Mechanic - Advanced metadata features
  6. DxO PhotoLab 6 - For top-level shooters
  7. Filecamp - Granular access control
  8. Daminion - Allows controlling file versions

As a street photographer with 8 years of experience, I already used multiple external hard drives to store my images. I keep my picture on multiple devices, which increases the risk of not finding the right shot when it is needed, which would be a great disappointment. Other images stored in the cloud may also vanish in a vast array of files to sift through.

Reasons to Use DAM Software

If you are thinking about how to start a photography business, digital asset management for photographers will help you solve several tasks at once. For instance, you can effectively manage and organize photos taken at different times. Below, you will find detailed information on where you may need to use DAM solutions, from the point of view of a professional shooter.

  1. Convenient photo organization. To find a photo taken during a certain photoshoot, you need to organize your files in the right way. Without free photo organizing software, you will hardly be able to find the right image quickly and scale up your photo business. If you don’t use DAM programs, you can manage only a limited number of photos without overloading your PC.
  2. File backup. Have you ever wondered how to restore your files if you spilled coffee on your PC? You can turn to professionals for help but there is no guarantee that they will restore your photos. This is why experienced photographers use digital asset management systems that come with cloud storage for photos. Thanks to it, your photos will be safe regardless of the state of your device.
  3. Effective human resource management. If you want to expand your business, you need to search for employees. To control their work, you can use photography business apps or other advanced software products. It will save you time when you train new staff. Your employees will find all the information they might need in your system and they can just follow instructions to solve any task.
  4. Maintaining service quality. It might be difficult to maintain the top quality of your work while you keep looking for the right place for your future photoshoots. Thus, to attract new clients and offer top-notch service to your long-term customers, you need to use photo asset management systems.
    If your staff keeps all their files on one cloud service, you won’t need to worry about how to work with different storage devices effectively. You can pay more attention to the quality of your services instead.
  5. Quick responses to customer requests. By using DAM, you can build strong relationships with your clients and ensure their satisfaction. For example, you can quickly find any photo if your customer loses it.
    Without an in-built system, it might be difficult to find an image, which lowers your chances of getting a positive review from a user. Before providing your services, I advise you to inform clients how long you are going to store their photos.

Main Features of DAM Programs

You can either choose a program that has been designed for storing and quick photo searching or find software tools that can be also used as free image converters and come with advanced file-sharing options.

  • Photo titles

Thanks to a tool that allows renaming your photos, you can easily find any image taken at a certain time. The main thing to do is to indicate the date of a photo in a file name. You can choose the common data format for all your pictures, for example, YYYY-MM-DD. Moreover, you can indicate your full name to protect your author’s rights. Some photographers also use the name created by a camera so to find a source file easily.

  • Keywords and metadata

To find your image quickly, make sure to indicate keywords and metadata. Not only will it help you find the right photo in no time but also provide you with more information about an image.

Besides saving information about resolution, file size, and color quality, you will know which collection a photo belongs to, and which camera you used to take it. If you follow the same steps while adding metadata tags to your pictures, they will be easier to find.

  • Adding copyright information

To protect your work, add information about photography copyright when you import your photos in DAM systems. If you do it, all the information about a photographer will be always available.

While digital asset management for photographers doesn’t fully guarantee that your works will be protected from copyright infringement, it prevents your photos from being stolen. If someone uses your photo without permission, you can prove your rights by using image metadata.

  • Shared access

While choosing a DAM system, check if it allows for collaborative work. For instance, MediaValet enables all users with the right permissions to view and comment files.

  • Versioning and permissions features

Most systems for media asset management come with Versioning and Permissions features. The latter is helpful when you need to assign access rights. You can limit access to certain photos to prevent your staff from sending unedited images to a client.

The Versioning feature has been designed to control different versions. It enables you to extract files, edit them, and save them to the system. Your staff will have access only to the most recent file versions whereas you will have access to all of them and will be able to restore a previous version at any moment.

  • Integration with services

DAM programs that support integration with third-party services make your work significantly easier. For instance, when you publish photos on a WordPress website, you can integrate the DAM system with your platform.

1. Adobe Bridge – Convenient batch processing

adobe bridge digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Metadata editing feature
  • Batch processing
  • Quick search filters
  • XMP technology
Cons
  • Only allows backing up files manually

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: Free

Price: Free

Adobe Bridge is my favorite digital asset management photo solution that comes with handy preview, systematization, editing, and photo publishing features. By using it, I can easily edit metadata, assign keywords, labels, and rankings, apply filters, and use convenient file search features.

With the help of this photo catalog software, I also needed to create a portfolio for my works by uploading files to Adobe Portfolio, and I should acknowledge that it was a cinch. In addition, when exporting photos directly to Adobe Stock, this service automatically assigns keywords to them, so I don’t have to label my images manually.

2. Adobe Lightroom Classic – Universal for photographers

adobe lightroom classic digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Cloud storage
  • Convenient search options
  • Keywords mapping
  • Synchronization with different devices
Cons
  • Restricted mobile support
  • More suitable for editing tasks

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: 7-day

Price: $9.99/month

Adobe Lightroom Classic is probably the best DAM for photographers, as it offers a great variety of photo editing and file management options. Besides, it allows selling your images and previewing them from various devices. With Adobe Lightroom, it is also easy to find the needed pic based on certain criteria in a feature.

Besides, assigning keywords to all my images, the program allows manually adding copyright information and signatures, which is a handy option for professional shooters like me. It helps protect my works as they will become easy to find on third-party platforms.

If to compare Adobe Bridge vs Lightroom, the latter has been designed specifically for photo editing, with photo asset management features being a nice addition to the list of its tools. I often use Lightroom for photo editing, so it's very convenient for me to have all the functions in a single feature set.

3. digiKam – For Linux users

digikam digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Can handle RAW files
  • Metadata management
  • Excellent tagging capabilities
  • Defines geolocation
Cons
  • Sluggish processing
  • Fails to perform well on Windows devices

Compatibility: Windows, macOS, Linux

Free trial: Free

Price: Free/Donation

As a digital asset management software for photographers, digiKam provides all the necessary options. It can handle both audio and video files and grouping versions of the same file is as easy as dragging one thumbnail onto another.

Another feature I like about this tool is its non-destructive editing ability. It also stands out among the competitors with cutting-edge features like decent face recognition technology, and fuzzy picture matching (which is the ability to find images based on the sketch), though when I tried scanning pics for this, the program stopped responding suddenly. And the developers claim that the tool only runs flawlessly on Linux devices but not on Windows ones.

4. ACDSee – Uses face detection technology to group pics

acdsee digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Backup copies
  • Batch processing
  • Facial recognition feature
  • Expanded metadata
Cons
  • Too cluttered UI
  • Complex for novices

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: 15-day

Price: $8.90/month, $99.95/one-time purchase

ACDSee is the digital asset management software for photographers that features useful tools for photo search and transfer, as well as file filtering and sharing options. Moreover, it has a backup feature, which is one of the reasons why I included this software in the review – unfortunately, many similar tools do not have such an option.

Thanks to facial recognition technology, I can tag my friends in photos to find all the images of them in no time. It especially appeals to me that the program offers color labels and location data to conveniently manage my files.

Advanced metadata information and batch features speed up the process. ACDSee is an ideal tool for making quick adjustments, as it allows me to resize my files, edit titles, and rotate several photos simultaneously.

5. Photo Mechanic – Advanced metadata options

photo mechanic digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Tools for adding keywords
  • Quick file import
  • “IPTC Stationery” concept
  • File transfer to supported services
Cons
  • Inconvenient cropping preview
  • No stacks

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: 14-day

Price: $178.80/year

Photo Mechanic created by Camera Bits is a digital asset management tool for Mac and Windows users. It can be used to view, manage, and organize photos. I like that I can quickly upload a picture from my camera, and add my signature, keywords, or a copyright sign. Once an image is ready, I only need to upload it to the chosen online platform.

The key difference of Photo Mechanic, which makes the program stand out from other DAM solutions is the use of the IPTC Stationery. Thanks to it, I can encode and decode my files by using any photo editing software for PC, which is in my daily toolkit.

6. DxO PhotoLab 6 – For professional photographers

dxo photolab 6 digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Convers RAW files
  • Convenient workspace
  • Can handle multiple files
  • Photo collection
Cons
  • DNG files from iPhones are not supported
  • No AI-fueled data management tools

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: 30-day

Price: $139

DxO PhotoLab 6 is a functional free DAM software and RAW photo editor, built to satisfy the needs of professional photographers. Its toolkit is similar to other popular DAM solutions, allowing photographers to label assets with color, as well as use ratings and keywords to filter all the assets and find the needed one in a jiffy. I could also select or reject an image in no time.

It also allows photographers to group pictures using details in their metadata. For example, I can display the files with a particular ISO speed to define the ‘noisiest’ photos to fix – this is a feature, which I have not found in any other file management tools. Unfortunately, its toolkit does not contain AI-powered management options, but it stands out among the competitors with its RAW processing capabilities.

7. Filecamp - Granular access control

filecamp digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Customization and branding options
  • A well-thought-out UI
  • Reliable tech support
  • For companies of all sizes
Cons
  • Doesn’t allow previewing .doc files
  • Restricted mobile functionality

Compatibility: Windows, macOS

Free trial: 30-day

Price: From $29/month

Filecamp is a digital asset management software for photographers that makes it easier to upload, organize, share files, and edit them with clients or team members. Since it’s a cloud-based solution, my information is stored online. This software has an intuitive user interface and affordable price packages, which makes it stand out among other similar platforms.

Being a reliable and popular Software as a Service (SaaS), Filecamp is perfect for businesses that want to store their information in a highly secure cloud environment without wasting their money on expensive storage options. While its interface is pretty basic, this software still has a set of handy features for editing and sharing files, managing digital assets, and collaborating with a team.

8. Daminion – Convenient file version control

daminion digital asset management software for photographers
Pros
  • Functional metadata management tools
  • Supports multiple formats
  • Allows converting files
  • Integrates with various programs
Cons
  • Complicated to learn
  • Restricted cloud integration

Compatibility: Windows

Free trial: Yes

Price: By request

Daminion offers all the features that I might need when managing files. It can write photo metadata and handle RAW files (or sidecar files) without problems. The software demonstrated extreme stability under testing and I especially like that the tool allows importing and exporting hierarchical keywords to and from Photo Supreme via a generic text file.

By switching the ‘Catalog Tags’ sidebar between the ‘Filter Items’ and ‘Assign Tags’ modes, I can simplify and optimize my workflow considerably. Similar to other reviewed DAM programs, it offers drag-and-drop functionality, which makes geotagging a cinch.

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