There are many DAM apps:
PhotoMechanic
Extensis
ACDSee
IDImager / PhotoSupreme
iMatch
I avoid clouds. For my purpose it is inconvenient, money that can go to new large drives, and slow.
Lightroom or CaptureOnev7 are maybe DAM's for RAW files of cameras, but not Digital Asset Managers. In fact the biggest request users make for LR is to support more filetype, such as their own Adobe types like PDF, IDesign, PSB, and common ones, PNG, and others.
I use lightroom with 2 catalogs so far and have about 400K images. I did slow down. You have to raise the cache size. There are more speed issues when displaying on large screens and large raw files..
So...No LR is not a DAM as it can't allocate its resources to just being a DAM. It is also a RAW processor with lots of functions that slow each others functions down as you switch from one module to the other. With 2 apps running along side, ther would be no switching. In fact if ACRaw had the functions of the Develop module on LR, I would not use LR at all.
But, ACR isn't like LR, sooooo, I use it, and it is easy to use. But I would be blind of my actual content without ACDSee, which is a DAM as it can catalog. I use it as a super Explorer to find files. Hope this helps.
I should add to the above...perhaps if LightRooms Library module grew into Bridge, I would surely use it. In the past I found Bridge to be unstable, and never liked the 2 files it places in each folder(not a huge deal). If they can make Bridge and LR Library merge, and do this by the Bridge folder ability look up changes made in a folder , It would prompt you and show the new files available to add to the Library/catalog. This would be the direction I could see very possible.
