Thanks for this - I noted it but didn't actually watch it until today when time permitted. I have used PM for some years and is a god send when I have a load of pictures to swiftly go through and cull the duds. They rarely ask for money and that suits me just fine. I just looked - I brought v4 in 2008 then updated to v6 in 2020.
It has always been an overkill for what I use it for but continue to ingest everything with it but stopped using a load of it's functionality when I realised that metadata, when used, offered more information publicly than I desired especially when using with Flickr and images on a public place. That said I now rarely use the online photo sharing sites anymore
I edit with DXO (and more recently restarted with Affinity) now rather than Photoshop - DXO specifically seems to strip out and alter what it doesn't like especially keywords so again stupidly I stopped using that. Now finding photos is a nightmare. It used to be easy with spotlight.
Do many folks here use PM6+? I have considered it several times but the cost to value over v6 seems unviable to me as a non business user.
1. Are you, (were you) exporting/uploading jpegs directly from PM. I'm pretty sure, but I need to check, that you can control what metadata is embedded in the Jpeg
2. Are you using DXO PL6?
I haven't paid much attention, but reviews have suggested a steady improvement in the way DXO handles metadata with each new release. I'm not sure I've noticed it stripping out keywords, so again I will need to check
3. I've used PM6+ since the first public beta (and like you, PM since v4). I use PM as a core part of my workflow, especially key wording, but the search tools in PM have never been very good and I feel that PM+ adds good search tools to PM. The upgrade from PM to PM+ was only, as I remember, $99 so it wasn't a difficult decision for me. I have no idea what the costs are now.
I have experience of using a range of DAMs (Media Pro, the catalogue tools in LR and C1, and Neofnder, plus some others) and while PM+ is a valuable addition to PM, I don't feel it is yet, a fully fledged DAM. For example there are no smart folders, no option to search on image orientation, and only a limited number of IPTC fields that can be searched for. Plus other small things, that I can't remember, but are standard features in every other DAM I've used.
Although there are no smart folders, you can save searches to a drop down list, and you manually create collections. When you right click on an image in PM, t tells you what collections an image belongs to.
It's very fast and excellent at browsing and searching within it's limited features. And, for me, who spends a lot of time in PM, the PM+ upgrade was well worth the investment.
As a low cost and powerful option it's hard to beat Neofinder. Photo Supreme and iMatch (if you are on Windows) are far more polished than PM6. The LR catalogue is still very good for photographers, but it really depends on what you want to do.
