Has the roadmap been abandoned/postponed/gone away on Holiday?

[Fred W]

I'm quite a fan of Pixelmator, and was originally very excited to see the launch of Photomator (bought it immediately, in fact) but I am still not using it at all because it continues to lack some very basic functionality such as sorting, rating, and tagging. I see that this been on the roadmap for some time, but a quick perusal of the News & Happenings threads over the past several months reveals announcements for things like "major Auto Straighten improvements" and "stunning new frames."

Now, perhaps those items were in great demand from a segment of users, and, of course, Pixelmator is a private company and can introduce whatever improvements they wish and at a time of their own choosing.

Nonetheless, it does seem odd that those items would take precedence over the items on the roadmap, particularly such fundamental things like the ability to do any kind of asset management whatsoever.

Am I missing something?


Signed,

Impatient User #34679

[Martin Chalifoux]

Asset management is high on the list. We need functionality to do culling after a shoot, and a way to rate and tag images.
Also Photomator added some RAW formats. That is fine. However Photomator still have no lens correction capabilities, and AppleRAW do not have a good coverage of modern lenses. For me on Canon RF there is no lens correction with Photomator since Apple support none of them, and that is a huge issue with wide angle lenses in particular.

So I concure, adding more editing features is nice, but Photomator is advertised as a RAW editor and the basics are not covered yet.

[Juhani]

Indeed the development of both apps seems glacial at the moment. I was also very excited at first and gave Pixelmator a good try before moving on to Affinity instead. Still I come back to Pixelmator for certain tasks. So I hope this movement does not completely die out quite so soon. Photomator also needs to mature quite a bit if it wants to become relevant for more serious users.

[cnqiu]

The roadmap does not set a timeline, which is a deception of paying customers.

[Michael P]

My guess is that these little features are sprinkled over time to make us wait while a major release (Photomator 4? ) is getting prepared.

[Fred W]

My guess is that these little features are sprinkled over time to make us wait while a major release (Photomator 4? ) is getting prepared.

Sneaky! But quite plausible.

[denisbkk]

I'm quite certain all the things on the roadmap will eventually come. Probably just some priorities changed.

I remember the time when people were complaining here that there is no roadmap. Then when there is a roadmap, then people start complaining there are no fixed times. That are the dangers of adding a roadmap and why most companies do not do it. Because people take it as a guarantee that will appear in the next 2 weeks. There is even a comment here that says "it is a deception of paying customers". That is really taking it out of proportions. A roadmap is never any guarantee for anything. That is not how development works. Roadmaps can change also, although Im sure the stuff on there the Photomator team will eventually add. But the time it takes and the order of things can certainly change. And I think that is what happened here.

[Andrius]

Hey gang, one of the devs here – I'm currently working on rating/flagging/filtering as we speak. Although it's still a little too early to talk about release dates, things are coming together nicely and we're entering the final stretch of the main development stage. Then we'll need to refine things, work on any performance issues, test the new features thoroughly, and release this into the wild.

[Rotamlexip]

Hey gang, one of the devs here – I'm currently working on rating/flagging/filtering as we speak. Although it's still a little too early to talk about release dates, things are coming together nicely and we're entering the final stretch of the main development stage. Then we'll need to refine things, work on any performance issues, test the new features thoroughly, and release this into the wild.

Hey Andrius! I hope you guys are doing great... I have a question. With this new update, will Photomator work with its own catalog/library/database the same way Lightroom does? If not, maybe some day? I'm pretty sure the day you guys implement this feature you will have a wave of Abobe users ditching LRc for Photomator. I really hope this is one of your goals.

Keep up the great work!

[Martin Chalifoux]

Hey gang, one of the devs here – I'm currently working on rating/flagging/filtering as we speak. Although it's still a little too early to talk about release dates, things are coming together nicely and we're entering the final stretch of the main development stage. Then we'll need to refine things, work on any performance issues, test the new features thoroughly, and release this into the wild.

Great to ear this is actively developed. Want to stress that culling a shoot is not just about adding tags, but we need a way to do a few very importante things easily without going to edit mode. Namely
1. Judge exposure with an accurate histogram of the RAW and also the JPEG (with a selection)
2. judging sharpness and focus ideally with a edge detection overlay
3. compare shots of a series to pick the best with a compare view as well as a may to zoom on a section of the image and then move to next/previous keeping the same zoomed view.
Finally that you save the flag info into an XMP file would be very helpful.

I correction use FastRAWViewer to cull images. It is designed just for that. I think it provides the feature set you should implement for a quality culling, tagging and sorting process. Just adding tags definitely does not cut it.

While at it GOD PLEASE add to the quick menu when right-clicking an image "Edit RAW" and "Edit JPEG" when we have a RAW+JPEG pair. You support the pairs but having to change settings to choose one or the other is ridiculous. Shooters do thins on a per-image basis. While at it also add the simple "Delete RAW only" and Delete JPEG only" to the same many so one can discard one of the two files as part of the culling process.

[Fred W]

Hey gang, one of the devs here – I'm currently working on rating/flagging/filtering as we speak. Although it's still a little too early to talk about release dates, things are coming together nicely and we're entering the final stretch of the main development stage. Then we'll need to refine things, work on any performance issues, test the new features thoroughly, and release this into the wild.

Thank you for the information, Andrius. Great to hear!

[Andrius]

Hey Andrius! I hope you guys are doing great... I have a question. With this new update, will Photomator work with its own catalog/library/database the same way Lightroom does? If not, maybe some day? I'm pretty sure the day you guys implement this feature you will have a wave of Abobe users ditching LRc for Photomator. I really hope this is one of your goals.

Keep up the great work!

Not with this update but we're starting to get to the point where we're going to need our own database – for example, when setting star ratings/flags, we're not going to be able to read the metadata for each image upon loading the library in the Files browser and maybe not everyone's going to want to directly modify the metadata of each image anyway. But a fully-fledged catalog/database file is probably not on the cards just yet.

Great to ear this is actively developed. Want to stress that culling a shoot is not just about adding tags, but we need a way to do a few very importante things easily without going to edit mode. Namely
1. Judge exposure with an accurate histogram of the RAW and also the JPEG (with a selection)
2. judging sharpness and focus ideally with a edge detection overlay
3. compare shots of a series to pick the best with a compare view as well as a may to zoom on a section of the image and then move to next/previous keeping the same zoomed view.
Finally that you save the flag info into an XMP file would be very helpful.

I really like these ideas – we'll be starting with flagging/rating/filtering for now, but more extensive culling-focused features are great to keep in mind moving forward.

As for XMP saving, that's coming. For RAW images/file formats that don't support XMP metadata, we save XMP files, for other formats like JPEG, we now write ratings/flags directly into the metadata. So ratings/flags from apps such as Lightroom Classic will appear in Photomator (and vice versa).

While at it GOD PLEASE add to the quick menu when right-clicking an image "Edit RAW" and "Edit JPEG" when we have a RAW+JPEG pair. You support the pairs but having to change settings to choose one or the other is ridiculous. Shooters do thins on a per-image basis. While at it also add the simple "Delete RAW only" and Delete JPEG only" to the same many so one can discard one of the two files as part of the culling process.

Great suggestions – that's on our roadmap, but I'll see if I can sneak it into this update.

[RichardWatkins]

Great to ear this is actively developed. Want to stress that culling a shoot is not just about adding tags, but we need a way to do a few very importante things easily without going to edit mode. Namely
1. Judge exposure with an accurate histogram of the RAW and also the JPEG (with a selection)
2. judging sharpness and focus ideally with a edge detection overlay
3. compare shots of a series to pick the best with a compare view as well as a may to zoom on a section of the image and then move to next/previous keeping the same zoomed view.
Finally that you save the flag info into an XMP file would be very helpful.
It's understandable to expect those fundamental tools to be prioritized over more cosmetic enhancements. While companies often have to balance user requests and business goals, it can be disheartening when basic functionality feels neglected. You're not alone in this sentiment, and hopefully, your feedback will resonate with the team at Pixelmator. Have you considered reaching out directly to express your thoughts? Sometimes, user input can help steer future updates. I’m currently working on my dissertation and felt overwhelmed. I heard about https://ukwritings.com/buy-dissertation ukwritings from a classmate who had a positive experience, so I checked it out. Buying a dissertation through their service was straightforward, and I was pleasantly surprised by how thorough the work was. The writer followed my guidelines perfectly, and it saved me so much time. If you’re in the same boat, I highly recommend this service!

I correction use FastRAWViewer to cull images. It is designed just for that. I think it provides the feature set you should implement for a quality culling, tagging and sorting process. Just adding tags definitely does not cut it.

While at it GOD PLEASE add to the quick menu when right-clicking an image "Edit RAW" and "Edit JPEG" when we have a RAW+JPEG pair. You support the pairs but having to change settings to choose one or the other is ridiculous. Shooters do thins on a per-image basis. While at it also add the simple "Delete RAW only" and Delete JPEG only" to the same many so one can discard one of the two files as part of the culling process.

Thank you, that is very helpful.

[Martin Chalifoux]

With today's release of 3.4 we have our answer. Sadly nothing meaningful was added. The culling features annonce is just a few flags that do not even work in all mode (not there on iPad file browser for example). This is a very minor update and nothing of substance has been added since last spring. Photomator is great at first sight but when you dig deeper it have very substantial features missing that make it not usable as a RAW editor
- no lens correction other than Apple RAW which do not support much, no Canon RF glass for example. Without lens correction RAW editing is pointless, modern wide angle glass in particular depend on having lens correction applied.
- so basic culling features that they are not usable
- RAW+JPEG image pairs are not workable because there is no way to tell the app which to edit on a per image basis, only a useless global setting.
- sidecar files are still way too big if you use any advance function such as denoise or the eraser, because they create a new pixel layer every time you use them. This was improved but you still can get 500mb sidecar files if you are not careful. The add up. if those functions were processed at export the sidecar would not need to be so big.

I was hopeful Photomator would get there. Users are providing the feedback. But they do not deliver. I am loosing hope.


It is too bad because the editing feature set is pretty good, but what is needed around that core simply never come. It is like the developers are image editors but they never shoot with a camera so they do not know about what is needed to make a workflow.