** UPDATE **  Unfortunately, it appears that this product is no longer available.  A real shame because the idea was a really good one.  In the meantime, I recommend you go check out this product instead that seems to do the same thing.. only better: http://mmk.f4.fhtw-berlin.de/Projekte/ImageSorter/.  Stay tuned!

My definition of DAM software is perhaps defined slightly more loosely than others. For me, DAM software is a product that allows you to maintain and find your images, music, fonts, and other digital assets. As a photographer, I tend to focus on managing my digital photo collection and doing things like applying metadata and creating client web galleries. For these actions, I tend to focus on using dedicated photograph management software (such as Idimager or Pro 2) but there are times when you just want to search for (and find) photos that are on your computer… and perhaps you don’t have keywords, tags or ratings already applied to them.

Recently, I needed to find a pink flower photo for a client whose poetry book I was working on. I knew I had attended a flower show a few years back but also knew that these images had not yet been keyworded (I know.. I know!) - I thought this was going to be a slow process for me, browsing for them manually or having to pull them all into my DAM application and exploring for it.

Luckily, I had recently received a message from a software developer who told me about a unique product his team had developed and was wondering if I would like to review it. He mentioned that it used a visual approach to finding images based on things like color and shapes… it sounded like a great idea and would be perfect for helping me to find the image I was looking for. Thus, here is my review of Photology - a unique DAM search tool that lets you find images visually wherever they reside on your system.

General Overview

From their website:

photology helps you navigate the flood of digital photos on your computer by finding photos using simple and intuitive filters like faces, sky, color, location, and time of day. no tags, no folders. it just knows.

The basic premise behind Photology is that users might not want to spend the time tagging, keywording and organizing photos but simply wish to find their photos based on items like color, date and whether the photo was taken during day or outside. In theory, this is a good idea as, in my example above, I was simply looking for a Yellow Flower… Let’s see how the software works.

Read the rest of this entry »