PicaJet
Search Build shortlist

digiKam, Air, Cloudflare Images, Portfolio

Side by side on what we have verified on each vendor’s own pages. Where a fact was not checked, the table says so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “no”.

What decides it · Runs on your own servers

If the files genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, this is not a close race — the platforms marked No below should not be on the call at all.

digiKam

Yes

Air

No

Cloudflare Images

No

Portfolio

Yes

Everything else

digiKam
Air
Cloudflare Images
Portfolio
Verdict
Free, open-source, cross-platform photo cataloging software for large RAW libraries, with tagging, geotagging and duplicate detection, meant to pair with a separate RAW editor.
A visually organized, board-based DAM for photo/image-heavy creative and marketing teams, with a genuinely usable free tier and a history of shifting, steep paid-tier pricing.
A cloud service for storing, resizing, optimizing and delivering images via API and CDN, aimed at developers building web and mobile apps that handle images at scale.
An on-premise DAM known for deep metadata and search, for existing Portfolio users who size and maintain their own server, now under Axle AI ownership after a March 2026 acquisition.
Price published
Yes
No
Yes
No
Billed on
Free software, no licence fee
Credits; users are not billed
Storage ($5 / 100,000 images stored / month), delivery ($1 / 100,000 images delivered / month), and transformations (first 5,000 unique transformations/month free, then $0.50 / 1,000 unique transformations/month). A unique transformation is billed per distinct parameter combination (e.g. same image at 100x100 and 200x200 counts as two). Storage/delivery charges apply only to images hosted in Cloudflare Images; transforming externally-hosted images is billed only under transformations.
Quoted per customer; the licensing model was preserved through the change of owner
Deployment
On-premise
Cloud
Cloud
On-premise
Free plan
Yes
Yes
No
No
Free trial
No
Yes
No
No
Transparency index
100%
60%
Not checked
25%
Most common complaint
It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design
The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only
Not checked
It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product

“Not checked” means exactly that: we have not verified it, not that the platform lacks it. Every other value was read off the vendor’s own pages on the date shown on each platform page.

What to ask on the demo

One question per platform, drawn from what actually goes wrong with it — not a generic checklist. Vendors run the demo; this hands the agenda back to you.

digiKam It has no collaboration, permissions or approvals by design — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Air The free tier is described in detail while the paid tiers are named only — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.
Portfolio It changed hands in March 2026, so anything written before that date describes it as an Extensis product — ask them to answer this in writing before the trial.

No email required — the page prints as it stands.