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Author Topic: Image cataloguing/management software  (Read 3365 times)

DarkPenguin

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Image cataloguing/management software
« on: August 03, 2005, 11:21:18 am »

Not sure if it does the offline stuff but Imatch is nice.

And ACDSee is slow and doesn't do anything Bridge can't.  (Other than try to play all your other media.)
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mikeseb

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Image cataloguing/management software
« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2005, 08:41:01 pm »

I have used Extensis Portfolio for nearly 2 years. It is powerful and flexible. It has a lot of display options, and its search capability is very good. My classification scheme is heavily dependent on keywording, which Portfolio does well. I like its interface better than Bridge. I like a lot of things about Portfolio.

My major complaint about Portfolio--and it's a big one--is that it doesn't seem to handle .xmp metadata very well, while Bridge does this smoothly. Because of this, Bridge and Portfolio don't play as well together as they should.

For instance, if I write metadata to a nikon raw (.nef) file in Bridge, it is written to the .xmp sidecar file. When I look at the same image in Portfolio, I might see the keywords I assigned but no other user-entered metadata appears in Portfolio. I also find Bridge's interface for entering metadata to be better than Portfolio's. This is not such an issue for .tif files, as metadata is imbedded in those files by either program and can be read in the other program without too much difficulty. I think the answer is for Extensis to bring its metadata handling capabilities up to the standard set by Bridge.

Because of this, I have been doing most of my metadata assignment in Bridge and then importing it (where this works) into Portfolio. Unless the next version of Portfolio improves this, I won't be upgrading and will probably abandon it.
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michael sebast

jd1566

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Image cataloguing/management software
« Reply #2 on: August 03, 2005, 03:54:52 am »

I purchased my first DSLR in march of 2003 and have been generating an ever increasing volume of images (+/-60gbytes currently).  I have come to the point where I have files lying all over the place, on CD’s, DVD’s, back-up hard drives as well as on my portable PC.    While I know most of the images I have taken, once an image is stored off my PC on a CD or DVD it basically means that’s the last time that I work on it.
I am therefore looking for a serious cataloging / image management software solution that allows me to catalogue files that will remain off-line, allow a database style sorting facility by type of image, date taken, subject, place etc as well as a thumbnail view of these files.
Currently I use CS2 with Bridge for viewing and sorting my images, and occasionally Phase One for batch processing Raw files.  I have searched the net and found the following image management software.  

Acdsee image catalogue software
iView Media Pro image catalogue software (ver 2.6.4)
Camera Bits Photo Mechanic (current 4.3.4)

1) I’d like to know if anyone has used this software and what their experience has been.
2) I would also like to know if anyone has suggestions other than this software.

Thanks for your help
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B&W photographer - Still lifes, Portrait

BradSmith

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Image cataloguing/management software
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2005, 07:15:07 pm »

I use IView Media Pro and it does everything you want.  I'm still back at Photoshop 7, so I can't speak for what features it has beyond Bridge (but I assume that offline database use one)

It works fine and has been stable.  I run it under Mac OS.

Brad
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