Yes, I am fully aware of this but for the moment it’s helping me sort through the mess I’ve created over many years in Lightroom. Adobe show no interest to improve the DAM features. It doesn’t even comply with the XMP specifications they themselves invented. I’m still looking for a more permenant home for ALL my assets.
Mike, in what way does Adobe not comply with the XMP specification? I know that they don't support custom metadata, but Lightroom XMP files were completely interoperable with Photo Supreme XMP files, in my experience. I used a Windows-only tool called XML Notepad 2007.
Download XML Notepad 2007 from Official Microsoft Download Center. It works fine under Windows 10. Using this tool, I saw that if LR imported an XMP file from Photo Supreme, and then wrote out the same file, all the information from Photo Supreme would be preserved, but the order of individual elements would be changed. However, there was no impact on the contents of the individual elements.
For a while, I tried to develop a workflow based on the combination of Photo Supreme and Lightroom, but eventually decided that the extra effort wasn't justified. As a one man company, resources are extremely limited, and there are frequent releases that are just bug fixes. Also, Photo Supreme suffers from a very poor user interface and completely insufficient documentation. I don't have enough experience with iMatch, but I also looked at Daminion, which I found lacked important capabilities, for example in renaming photos.
Overall, I wish that a DAM-only product vendor would create a plug-in for Lightroom, rather than forcing users to work with two distinct products. Wiht a plug-in they can focus their work on extending LR's functionaly, not having to duplicate it in their separate product.
Phil