As other replies have said, this is functionally a DAM.
It is particularly adapted to the requirements of publishers, in that it supports large number of images (we have over 3M currently), can scale to ingest many new images continuously quickly (publishers often receive lots of images from agencies and wires), indexes all the metadata to power a very fast search, allows collaboration of various roles involved in the use of assets and production of content, etc.
Unlike most commercial DAMs, which can be quite costly to run and acquire, Grid is also Open Source. We didn't find any existing DAM (incl Open Source) that fit our requirements, in particular in terms of ease and speed of use, powerful Web-based interface, rich APIs, etc.
You will have to review alternatives to know which one is the best fit for your use case.
Hope this helps clarify what Grid is wrt other DAMs.
As you can probably see yourself from the screenshot and video, not much.
There may be some subconscious influence from the old system and other image systems we have used (Lightroom, Picasa, Google Photos, Flickr, etc), but I can't think of particular features inspired from Picdar.
It looks to me like it is a DAM, just... a lot better than the alternatives (at least as of ~5 years ago when I evaluated options and ended up with a smaller-scale in-house version of this).
EDIT: Better in the sense of discoverability, at least.
It is particularly adapted to the requirements of publishers, in that it supports large number of images (we have over 3M currently), can scale to ingest many new images continuously quickly (publishers often receive lots of images from agencies and wires), indexes all the metadata to power a very fast search, allows collaboration of various roles involved in the use of assets and production of content, etc.
Unlike most commercial DAMs, which can be quite costly to run and acquire, Grid is also Open Source. We didn't find any existing DAM (incl Open Source) that fit our requirements, in particular in terms of ease and speed of use, powerful Web-based interface, rich APIs, etc.
You will have to review alternatives to know which one is the best fit for your use case.
Hope this helps clarify what Grid is wrt other DAMs.
Best,
- Séb, lead developer on Grid