What's your DAM solution?

DAM - Digital Asset Manager

Does anyone use a DAM tool for organizing, tagging, and searching your photos? Free or paid, I want to know your experience and thoughts on the topic!

I don't use lightroom, but I have other editing tools I use, so I don't really want/need an all-in-one cull/organize/edit software.

I'll consider paid software, but prefer to keep it cheap as I primarily do photography for myself/fun, not as a source of income. I often find myself looking for a photo I know I took of a specific setting or location, but often end up just browsing and scrolling for it until I find it - unless I know a specific date or have an image number as part of the filename to go off of.

Do you use some other method or software to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of photos you've taken, which ones you like, which ones you've edited, which ones you've printed, posted, used, shared, exhibited, sold, etc?

Originally, I just imported all my photos into dated folders and culled my "favorites" into a separate folder where I would organize, again by file/folder structure, which ones I had edited, posted online, printed, shown, advertised and/or sold, etc. Typically this resulted in a bunch of duplicates or multiple slightly different copies of the same picture. (different resolutions for online use vs. printing, with and without signature tags or watermarks, depending on their purpose, etc.)

And, while I cull the dump of photos after each shoot, I only delete the obviously bad and erroneous photos. So, while I have a separate copy of my "favorites" that I've done something with or potentially planned to do something with, there are still a bunch more images that didn't make the cut, that I'm afraid of getting rid of!

So, I've decided it's past time for me to find a better way to manage my collection and archive of photos...

I tried Aftershoot and some others (Imagen, filter pixel) for Culling, but my photography is mostly scenic, landscape, or macro and software like these are intended for photos of people and events. I found that any automated tools such as these don't do so well with detecting artistic vision when there's not a face in the photo! I looked at PhotoMechanic as well, it seems popular but I didn't see the value to me for the cost, even if I bought a perpetual license, that's a lot of money I could be putting towards new toys (i.e., lenses, tripods, etc.)

I've used ACDSee32 for many years, it was super fast and easy to view all images in a folder and delete things I didn't want, copy ones I liked to another folder, etc. Their newer ACDsee Free does a decent job and supports newer image file formats, but I'm still manually culling and organizing my images which is time consuming and doesn't provide an easy way to search for something months or years later...

Lately, I've been trying out both Allusion and digiKam for tagging my photos, and even looked at Darktable - not sure which I prefer yet or if there's something better out there...

So I thought - surely I'm not alone! I'm really curious to hear what your solution is?

How do you find that perfect sunset photo over the Grand Tetons you took a few years back... I mean it was just a few years ago at most, I think... wait, that was 10 years ago!?

If you've made it this far, thanks for sticking with my rambling. If you skipped all that and made it to this point, stop being lazy and go read. I promise it's not as boring as it looks. (fingers crossed)

Thanks!

-Kris
p.s. Photo attached for attention. :)