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Don't forget Microsoft's recent acquisition of iView Media Pro (http://www.iview-multimedia.com/), the only photo management/editing software I could find that could handle IPTC metadata in a way that made sense for me. iView has a pretty big following in the Mac community too, but I'm not sure how long the Mac version of iView will last...

iViewMedia Pro is the ticket. Extremely scalable, extremely versatile. Used by publishers to organize thousands of photos. Mac/PC.

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/

ed

"Microsoft doesn't yet have software to tie a photo library with Windows Live Local"

They do now. Microsoft just bought these guys, who write one of the most respected photo library management applications on the planet.

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/mediapro/

iview mediapro: http://www.iview-multimedia.com/products/

How Aperture differs from iPhoto:

1. Capacity. I currently have an iPhoto library which is getting close to 5000 images. On my 1.3 ghz Powerbook, starting the program is painful, and was getting more so quickly due to the fact that I recently started shooting in RAW format. Aperture (supposedly) can support much larger image libraries, and is geared towards a RAW based workflow.

2. Metadata. Ever tried keywording images in iPhoto? It is a massive pain in the ass. The only interface for assigning keywords is a multiple-checkbox window that requires a free 3rd-party plugin to make it remotely useful. (Kudos to that developer, by the way). Aperture fixes this by making keyword entry much easier, although according to the review, it badly breaks the EXIF keywords.

To answer another one of your questions: This thing don't got layers. But it's not really intended as an image editing application. Aperture is supposed to be used in conjunction with other editing software, like photoshop. It's supposed to help you keep your images and your million or so versions of them better organized: if you're familiar with Adobe Bridge, it's a bit like that. It's a good thing that it's not a full fledged image editing application, though: reviewer notes that a lot of the most frequently used editing tools that are in the program are lacking (noise reduction and sharpening, for example).

Anyway: feh, seems to be the overall impression of the reviewer, and feh would have to be my verdict too until some of the oversights he notes are addressed. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out iView Media Pro, which seems to be less buggy, but just as featureful, and costs less than half as much.

Iview MediaPro has been recommended to me. It's smart about offline files, supports all sorts of tagging and searching, and isn't scared of terabyte-scale archives.

That being said, Gallery 2 has most of the same capabilities. It's a web photo sharing package, but you don't need to give the whole internet access to it. Gallery 2 is quite a powerful database, and if you're smart about tagging things as you add them, the search functions are impressive.

"It falls apart once you have 10-20k images (something a pro can easily shoot within a few days)."

Just to be nitpicky, here. 20,000 day / 72 hours = 278 photos per hour. That assumes you never take a break to eat or sleep during those 3 days.

I know pros can really pile up the pictures, fast. But I think even photo pros need to sleep and eat. Besides, don't photo pros use something like iView MediaPro to store and organize their photos?

This has nothing to do with adobe and photoshop.

This has everything to do with companies like Bibble Labs, Phase One, iView Multimedia who all make 'raw workflow' software.

For those of you who are new, or don't care, or don't use RAW workflow it's about the post processing that most enthusiast, semi-pro, and pros doin once the pictures are taken and before they're edited in Photoshop (if needed).

Photoshop has something included that has been showing up in the last few versions, they call it adobe camera raw but it is rasterized out of camera RAW and then you edit it like you would any other image.

What Aperture, and the others let you do is 'pre-process' your image to do lossless corrections to things such as white balance, color cast, cropping, etc. If you make any of these types of changes inside photoshop once you import in the RAW file you are doing it with data loss.

This is a step before photoshop, not a slap in the face and replacement.

This is condiments to the burger. The burger is much more filling than just the condiments, but the condiments aren't all that by itself

iView Media pro already does this. You just tell it to find dupes and set the tolerence to loose. http://www.iview-multimedia.com/

Google may have the same "make it work" ethic as Apple, but I've found Google's user interfaces to be on the mediocre side. Compare Gmail to Mail.app, for example, or Google Desktop Search to Tiger's Spotlight.

Did you ever find a suitable replacement for iPhoto on your Mac? I've read great things about iView Media, but it costs $50.

"Batch Change" in the photo menu

Err, couldn't they just let you change the comments in the comments field? As it is it's disabled for multiple selections. Wouldn't that make more sense? The Batch change is a kludge that they've tacked on - in fact I hadn't even found it (as you suspected). Thanks for letting me know about it though.

If you don't like the HTML export

If they'd done the export with templates (as they should have), it wouldn't be a problem. I'm aware there are 3rd party solutions.

I'm not sure what you mean by "custom tags"

By custom tags I meant a combination of an arbitrary fieldname and value, so I could add a tag to photos that are sold like this

sold = 25

with a different sale value for each one (or whatever, that's just an example off the top of my head). Keywords is the equivalent of one extra field.

My biggest gripe is the layout of your picture library on disk.

I understand it's useful for some people, and some things like the slideshows are really nice, but it also has serious limitations. If you take a look at iView just for example you'll see what I mean. It was really Steve Job's hubris in saying 'it's not worth bothering writing that sort of app' which got me started ranting : )

iPhoto does what no photo organization app before it ever did - iPhoto makes photo organization EASY! That should be a big "holy shit, that's amazing!", because even after it being out for almost 2 years, NO ONE has made anything near as nice and easy to use as iPhoto.


Try iView, which has been going since 1995. I've been using it 4 years for all my work. I don't use iPhoto because it treats me like a 5 year old. I want to store things like tearsheets, low-res pics, processsed pics, text, book dummies, press clippings, sound clips, and notes together project by project. For people used to keeping pics in a shoebox, I can see the use of iPhoto. But for people whose pics are worth money, who would never store a photo as a jpeg, whose negatives are filed and stored under controlled conditions, iPhoto is not the answer.

If you're going to pay for a photo catalog program, skip iPhoto and grab iView Media or iView Media Pro instead. Way, way better.

I think you meant to say iPhoto reigns supreme. On the other hand, my preferred cataloging program is iView MediaPro . It's much more flexible in html or print output. It catalogs my files from their existing location instead of copying them to a set of application folders. Finally, if you move files while the application is open, it automatically updates its database to note the new location.