So in practical terms, how do you find the plus version useful? I've read the differences on their site but without using the software the benefits are not clear.
PM (standard) isn't a DAM. it’s a sophisticated file browser for ingesting files from memory cards and managing metadata, and for very quickly exporting files via FTP.
It's roots, and still it's key customer focus are professional sports and event photographers who need to rapidly cull, add metadata and bulk export images.
It "was" unique in using the Raw file embedded jpeg for all file operations, but also working with ACR for editing before exporting.
The USP for PM was speed and automation: the use of sophisticated templates during ingest that read the exif data during ingest to automatically file and rename files along with autofillng metadata.
For example, on ingest, I automatically prepend the last three numbers of the cameras serial number to the file name, and as I have templates set up for my photographic locations, all location data, some keywords, and partially completed captions are also automatically added to the metadata in th XMP on ingest.
But you can also have PM read txt files and codes/tokens to fill in metadata. For official sports events these might be the name and other details of football players playing at a specific match. By typing the jersey number into a metadata field within PM, the program will look up the txt file and replace the jersey number with the players name and team name.
I use PM codes on ingest to read the exif data and automatically add Season and orientation keyword (ie, Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter and Vertical or Horizontal) to the XMP
I also use codes to autocomplete animal and plant names in the metadata fields so, for example, I can type the code"=marha=". and PM instantly types "Marsh Harrier (Circus aeruginous)". PM auto completes the code so usually I only need to type "=mar" and hit return.
I get get an initial caption of "Marsh Harrier (Circus aeruginous), RSPB Ham Wall, Glastonbury, Somerset, England GBR by simply typing "=mar" and return. by selecting all the files with Marsh Harriers before typing "mar" into the selected file, I can complete the initial caption in many files with a few keystrokes. The location data is autofilled during ingest by the ingest template for Ham Wall.
Subsequent editing and adding metadata is extremely flexible and fast as the program is designed around the rather specialised use of sports photographers trying to cull, edit and upload files to news agencies during live events. But, with the tools, just as useful for other event photographers, e.g wedding, where you are dealing with culling large numbers of photographs or wildlife photographers who may come back with hundreds/thousands of similar photographs that need culling and captioning/keywording.
Both Lightroom and Capture one now use the RAW embedded JPEGs for culling and the massive speed advantage of PM for this has waned, C1 has also added some smart culling tools (as well as overall being much faster than LR) but neither can still fully match the speed and flexibility of PM for ingesting. keywording and captioning.
Users, have stories of how culling/captioning that used to take them days/weeks now takes them hours since switching to PM (and learning how to use its features)
BUT PM (standard) has no DAM, or built in editing tools. If you were on a Mac, PM would use the Macs ndexing tool (Spotlight) to search metadata, But Spotlight was unreliable at reading photo file metadata . Indeed at one point they removed the Spotlight integration because of its unreliability, but users demanded they put it back.
Equally, because PM (standard) doesn't build and index image previews and metadata, if you wanted to browse "all" your photographs rather than just the photographs from a single event, it was very slow at building thumbnails for your entire photo collection.
PM Plus adds the DAM features so it now builds a properly indexed database of metadata and previews, Searches and rendering thumbnails are super fast with PMplus. Apart from these DAM features, PM standard and PMPlus are identical, but if you want to work e.g modify metadata, on a subset of your entire collection the features of PMPLus are pretty well essential.
The big flaw with PM standard (and by default PMPlus), is that there are no image editing tools. I usually use ETTR, or deliberately expose to ensure highlight details giving me either very light or very dark images to assess and you can't adjust the exposure in PM, This makes these pictures impossible to properly assess in PM. For these pictures I have Fast Raw Viewer set up as the default editor in PM and make the assessment in FRV
The big flaw with PMPLus is that still has things missing: No smart folders, and limited search fields (including orientation). This has been done to keep everything speedy, as turning PM into a DAM while also keeping it's reputation for speed and reliability . The latter was apparently a major headache, which was why PMPlus took almost 15 years to go from alpha into public beta.
I could go on and explain how I am trying to replace PMPlus, but I have written enough, and so far nothing has properly replaced it.
Surely software that handles tagging is only writing to the metadata and not re-encoding the picture data?