Microsoft buys iView

[Hae-Yu]

This is really only relevant to photographers and those with large image collections

If you take a lot of pictures, you use PhotoBridge, iView, PhotoMechanic, or Portfolio. I chose iView although PhotoMechanic is a very nice app too. iView is more focused on organizing, whereas PhotoMechanic is focused on ingesting and sorting pictures - say from massive photo shoots with 30 photographers. Each cost about the same as ACDSee Pro.

I'm guessing that because MS Digital Image Library has largely been integrated into Vista, MS needed to fill that gap in their lineup.

[psychonaut13]

bridge is the shit for browsing files while you work!

[Hae-Yu]

PhotoBridge is really limited.

You can DL a full 30 day trial from iView. IView has the features to browse massive collections, including versioning. It has all of the features ACDSee Pro has PLUS it a much more professional UI.

http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/asset-management.shtml
he addresses the benies of using iView over Bridge.

A more comon scenario than his is if you work on a laptop and then load to a b/u HD. It doesn't have any problems cataloging images across any odd scenarios.

[Hae-Yu]

If you're used to using Abobe Bridge with Camera Raw or any of the raw converters to track your files, you're probably wondering what the big deal is. Why do you need yet another program to track and catalogue your image files. Well, maybe you don't. But, if you're like most professional photographers, or those who pursue their art and craft with vigor, you likely have many hundreds of Gigabytes of raw files, JPGs and completed Photoshop files – probably even Terabytes. In all likelihood these are scattered over a number of different drives. How do you find files when you need them?

My own situation is as follows. I currently have ten 150 GB to 250 GB outboard Firewire drives, containing together all of my work done over the past 10 years. These are backed up to two 1 Terabyte network drives, along with DVD's off site, and a lot of other strategies – but that's another story. My primary storage then is these 10 drives, totaling at the moment about 2 Terabytes of files.

Only the drives for my current projects are turned on all the time while I'm working. The other 8 or 9 drives are attached. but not powered on. This means that they are not consuming electricity, generating heat and noise, and are also not subject to failure from continuous use. When I need the files that are on these disks I simply turn them on, wait a few seconds for them to get up to speed, and retrieve the files that I need. This may only be a couple of times a month, if that.

But the trick is – how to know what's on each drive, and which drive of several a particular needed file or files might be on. This is where IVP3 is worth its weight in gold.

To catalogue a directory with a few hundred files just takes moments. No real time at all, though it's not as fast as Photo Mechanic. This is because IV3 actually creates a catalogue of thumbnails that is separate from the actual image files themselves, and herein lies its strength. Once a directory of files is catalogued, even an entire disk's worth, that hard disk no longer needs to be online, or even attached. The thumbnail catalogue resides on your primary disk (or wherever you wish), and looking though or searching the thumbnails takes place within the thumbnail index. The same directory structure as was used on your hard disk is retained, so it's easy to identify where a particular file is located. Also, if the hard drive that contains the file desired is on-line, then double clicking on its thumbnail inside IV3 will actually call up and display the full resolution file, even if it's a raw file. And (this is the part that I like best) dragging the thumbnail onto an application such as Photoshop will cause the actual file itself (not the thumbnail) to be loaded into that application – for raw processing in Camera Raw, for example.

Though IV3 is fast, almost instantaneous on small and moderate sized directories, indexing a 250 GB hard drive can take time. Something over 22,000 raw and PSD files on an almost full 250 GB drive takes about 2 hours to index. Of course this can take place as a background task while you do other things, or overnight. The associated catalog file ended up being 133 Megabytes – smaller than just one of my finished Photoshop files, so no real storage burden. Once the catalog has been built you can also specify that it be auto-updated. This means that any time that new files are added or deleted to that directory, or even anywhere on an entire disk, IV3 will automatically catalog them.

IV3 is not just for cataloging raw files from digital cameras and other image files. It is a visual database, and as such can be used to catalog web pages, video files, PDF's, and more. Each file is represented by a thumbnail and each thumbnail is not just visually searchable, but also searchable via its EXIF and IPTC data.

There's far more to IV3 than discussed so far. Contact sheets can be laid out and printed, slide shows and movies of slide shows generated, colour profiles imbedded and changed, and more...

A word of warning though. IVIew Media Pro is addictive, and you'll soon wonder how you ever worked without it.
While I only have a couple of Gigs of photos, I can testify to the speed of the catalog. The db displays my whole library instantly. I can sort/ filter using the IPTC/ EXIF keywords instantly. Everything about it is fast, although the initial load takes a few minutes because it builds thumbnails.