The database is largely irrelevant if the software is of any decent quality. That is to say, you should really only consider software using open standards or with published specifications.

Lightroom uses EXIF, IPTC and XMP - you don't lose anything in terms of keywords or metadata if you move away from Lightroom.

I would expect that Picasa and ACDSee also use the same standards, but I don't know for sure - should be easy to verify.

What you would "lose" in respect to Lightroom, is the ability to reproduce its visual edits until such time as another piece of software replicated the features/instructions stored in their metadata. However, you can always also generate TIFF (or other format) versions with the edits in place if you wanted to stop using Lightroom. Your raw files (be they actual RAW format, JPEG format or whatever) and their descriptive metadata are always preserved.

I would also strongly recommend you start shooting in raw exclusively. DOn't waste your time as I did for a while shooting JPG+RAW. You will only be left with a bunch of JPG images you'll never use. Once you start using one of these programs you won't feel you're missing the JPG images at all - you can easily export as many JPG images at any time for any purpose.

I was under the impression that Lightroom and ACDSee (may) store some data (keywords, in particular, or comments) in their DB and not in the EXIF, IPTC, XMP. Maybe I am wrong in this, at least for Lightroom?

ACDSee is more confusing, now that I think about it. While paying with it yesterday, I did see that ACDSee has some metadata which is supposedly in the local DB, while other is in the EXIF/IPTC. I need to read more. I am guessing it is possible that ACDSee takes EXIF/IPTC data and copies it into a local db for performance reasons... Mmmh.

Lightroom does store/cache a lot of stuff in its own DB. However, that is only for ease of use and performance. Everything can be written back to either the imbedded metadata or sidecar files.

If Lightroom was constantly accessing the contents of the files themselves, then performance would be even slower than it is now.

Lightroom writes out all your metadata for a given image into the xmp "sidecar" files. I regularly copy pictures to my laptop, process them in Lightroom, then copy the raw files + xmp files over to my desktop, and everything just works.

What doesn't just magically work is when you start making "virtual copies" of your pictures. Do that, and you're guaranteed a world of hell in trying to move your images from one computer to another.

Picasa, last I checked, has its own proprietary but remarkably simple text format, one file per directory, where it writes everything out. Not really a big deal to write a short Perl/Python/whatever program to crack it.

I have no idea about ACDSee.

It's worthy to note that Lightroom only writes sidecar files for files that it cannot (or will not) write directly into - which can be even for simple EXIF edits in my experience.

And it's a good idea to force it to write out all its data before moving it around, just to make sure that what exists outside the database is fresh/current.

I've found that the tricky issues come when trying to use another piece of software along side Lightroom that may have the capability to write directly into the file (back to the original EXIF). At that point you've got to do a little dance to make sure you have the correct data, including refreshing the info in Lightroom. Be careful, because if the other program can't deal with the external XMP, then you're going to be stuck and won't be able to merge the two sets of edits. In such a case it's a good idea to use the external program first. Specific example, some GeoTagging software I've tried in Mac OS.

Since you also brought up Bibble, do you have any thoughts on Lightroom vs. Bibble? Most of the comparisons I've found online have been fairly outdated, but the gist of it comes down to minor (and subjective) colour differences, and a slightly better UI in Lightroom. I saw one review that said Lightroom's de-noising is significantly better than Bibble (which has some basic Noise Ninja settings), but may not be any better than Bibble + the registered Noise Ninja plugin, which gives full control. Oh, and Bibble's fill light sucks.

The pluses for me, is that I can store my images on my harddrive however I want, and, should I ever go back to Linux at home (from OS X), I can keep using it.

I've never actually used Bibble. I have roughly one year of my shooting in "converted" DNG format (having discarded the original raw files). Since Bibble doesn't support this, that was a deal-breaker for me. Perhaps I should revisit Bibble.

As such, I can't really offer a meaningful comparison between them. What's eminently clear is that Bibble's authors are performance nutcases, so Bibble should run significantly faster than Lightroom. If you're on older hardware, that's a big consideration. On the flip side, Lightroom's UI is supposed to be better and there's real third-party plug-in support now. (For example, I regularly use the PicasaWeb exporter from Jeff Friedl.)

Ok. ACDSee also does as Lightroom. It creates its own, hdd-based DB after collecting data from the actual photo files; it writes either on DB only (rating, and others), or in sidecar files, or in the jpg files themselves depending on the cases.
There is a quite explanatory paragraph in the on-line help.

It actually is really good in letting you decide where in your file system you want the DB to be, and provides, on its website, a nice video tutorial on how to use the built-in migration feature to move the DB from one PC to another. However, because it is so nicely configurable, one could simply move the files and have the newly-installed software point at the selected db location.

ACDSee is proving, in my little test in these days, a really good software. The GUI is not as nice as Lightroom, but it is indeed very good and more configurable. It is not as feature rich in terms of editing, but very rich nonetheless. And it is faster, by far, than Lightroom.

Plus, it comes with very nice features Lightroom does not offer: a blazing fast, flexible and poweful quick viewer, and, also important, it automatically detects new dirs and files added to your collection. Lightroom does not, and when you force it to do so, it has been incredibly slow in adding pictures and metadata.

So, ACDSee has all I seem to need (except for face recognition, which I gave up on), and one show-stopper : it won't read Canon Lens Used metadata. It is being requested by dozens of users (some professionals among them, I read) on their forums, and there's no word from the producers. That's quite disappoiinting. I would be seriously considering to purchase it, but it is annoying for me not be able to sort pictures by lens used. Too annoying, I am afraid, to justify $180.
Yes, I may do that from windows explorer, but I'd rather have it within the same sw I use to organize and catalogue my collection, of course.

In any case, I'll keep testing... I may change my mind and decide to get it, at the end of the trial period. I still can't find anything else that gets as close to what I want as ACDSee, I have to say. If only lightroom came with a nice quick viewer...

... For the record, Windows Explorer does have two metatags available concerning Lens, but they don't show anything, neither for Nikon nor for Canon pictures.

I believe that the converted DNG still isn't supported, but they do support some straight-from-the-camera DNG. I don't know how they tell the difference. If you do give it a whirl (or if anyone else has used both), I'm all ears.


There is plugin support for bibble, but I have my doubts that the number of available plugins is as extensive as for Lightroom. Bibble has a "web gallery" export, but I don't know if that means "dump out images and an html file" or "upload to Picasa/Facebook/pick-yer-poison".

This is not really answering your question, as I am not experienced with either sw in terms of photo editing.
But, I've been testing Bibble as an photo collection manager in the last weeks, and I did not particularly like it. It crashed few times while accessing my photo collection, which is on a shared directory in a file server. It crashed a couple of other times while importing the whole collection (30,000 pics). It often takes time to shut down, saying that it is "busy", which gets annoying.
Most importantly (to me), I've used it so that my catalogue would only be referring to the file system, as I have my pictures organized in directories and don't want them moved. In such a mode, I would have expected that it would detect changes in the file system, and update the catalogue automatically. It does not. You get thumbnails with a "?" on them to indicate the original file is "missing".
In this respect, so far ACDSee is by far the best photo collection manager I've found, at least for me. It does all I want, and very quickly.
I liked, in Bibble, though, that you can easily create more catalogues, which is not an easy task in ACDSee. Supposedly, nexy ACDSee version will include some easier multi-catalogue support.

Finally, how hard can it be to detect Canon lens info?!
ACDSee does not yet detect Canon Lenses at all, and on their forum I read "it is being implemented"; Bibble does, but 90% of pics report wrong lens info! In my collection I had thousands of 70-300 lenses used, which I do not own, in the "24-70" focal length range?!
Since Lightroom gets them right, I know it must be possible. How hard can it be?