I received an email the other day from Murat Korkmazov, the business development director of Daminion Software, an archiving program touted as being designed as a "low-cost alternative for the needs of the small team."
I visited the website and must say I was impressed with the ease of navigating the site and the robust set of features of the product were equally attractive. They also have a server version as well. Finally, the pricing seemed too good to be true -- with deep discounts for education departments.
OK, so did I download a demo and give it a test run?
Nope.
Unfortunately, Daminion is a Windows-only program, which seems a bit odd since most professional photographers I know and certainly most design departments in this neck of the woods run on and around Macs. But Daminion is a Russian company which might partially explain the Windows-only requirement -- due to cost and ease of acquisition, many computer users outside the US and Canada have come to rely on the cheapness and accessibility of PCs driven by Windows.
In any case, according to Murat they have no plans for producing a Mac version anytime soon.
Whatever the reason, it's too bad because this program looked pretty good -- the UI that I could see from the screen shots reminded me a bit of the old Expression Media 2 -- a wonderful catalog-driven archiving program now iterating under the name of Media Pro at Phase One. Plus it was loaded with a ton of features that just cried out to be tested.
I'm providing a link to the company's site -- or you can cut 'n paste the URL if you prefer: http://daminion.net/ in hopes that someone may test it out and let us know if this is a reasonable compromise between Bridge and a full blown DAM.
And best of luck to Murat and his colleagues in Stavropol, Russia.
Oh, and one final word: they do have offices in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC.
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