I now have over 5,500 photographs in my personal collection. Large, but not nearly as large as many other people, especially professional photographers. That said, I plan to agressively grow that number now that my new baby has arrived. Not a child, no, I’m talking about my Canon 20D which is in my opinion, still the best “bang for your buck” as far as a decent digital camera goes.
So - faced with the task of managing 5,500 photographs and coping with a soon-coming flood of newer photos, I realized that I needed a Digital Asset Management program - some clever piece of software that was going to do a good job of organizing my photos and let me retrieve EXACTLY what I wanted, when I wanted.
I must admit a huge catalyst for 18 hour DAM software testing binge was none other than Adobe’s Lightroom. I had been anxiously waiting for Lightroom since it was first announced more than 6 months ago (I’m a PC guy, not Mac) and after finally testing it out last week, well… let’s just say it leaves a truckload to be desired in the performance department. It is a beta, but unless Adobe can crank out somewhere between 800% and 1200% more performance, it will be too much of a dog for anyone to use in a professional workflow.
While Lightroom does “properly” (more on this later) catalog images, it simply isn’t up to par right now - so I decided I needed to go on a fevered mission of DAM software testing. I’m one of these tenacious people that becomes borderline obsessive compulsive about things…. so I literally spent 18 hours over 3 days doing nothing more than testing out photo cataloging software.
So - why did I say “properly“? For some bizarre reason I still do not understand, very few companies are writing software that catalogs software in an industry standard, portable format. This was my primary concern, and so right off the bat it eliminated many of the popular pieces of software: Picasa, ACDC, etc.
Specifically, here’s what I looked for in a cataloging software (and I recommend you do too):
- Full (and intrinsic!) support of EXIF, IPTC, and XMP
- Blistering speed
- Fast thumbnail creation
- Native RAW support
The first line is critical: for some bizarre reason the entire industry has been very slow to embrace the idea of embedding meta data into the photograph itself. This reluctance is nothign short of assinine. There are now THREE standards for meta data, each handling a specific type of data, and yet the vast majority of software packages ignore it or at best, support it as a half-baked feature.
Candidates:
- iView MediaPro
- MediaDex - Formerly Cumulus
- Extensis Portfolio
- Photools
So what did I go with? iView MediaPro. I’ll admit I was hasty and uninstalled it the first time around… but after seeing that many of the pros on Photo.net loved it and called it the “800 lb. Gorilla of the DAM world” I decided to give it another go - and man am I happy with it. It took a minimal amount of digging to find the Info panels I was looking for, and with a limited amount of effort I was quickly adding tags, keywords, and other important cataloging data to my photos. Best of all, with a single action all of the data is written into the photo - making my catalog essentially portable.
I’ll be posting a more indepth review of all of the packages soon, but in the meantime, if you have a sizeable collection or if you plan on growing it, I highly recommend trying iView MediaPro out… it’s fantastic.
Image Courtesy of 
