Photools.com IMatch

I was happy to see others had reviewed this product as well. It seems to be slowly finding it's way into a larger niche :) In short, IMatch will do anything you want it to do. Period, end of story. However, IMatch is not good for people who aren't computer "saavy" (whatever that means!) For some, IMatch is going to be way too much too look at and impossible to use. For others, it'll make sense and be quite usable after only a few moments studying the interface. I think I fell somewhere in between. The single reason I purchased IMatch was the boolean logic nature of it's categories. Once I saw than I could tag an image with "Places.California" and "Nature.Mushrooms" and then later instantly get a list of photos by doing "Places.California AND Nature.Mushrooms" I was HOOKED! You can use AND and OR between tags to generate new categories on the fly. A lot of thought went into this program and I can't believe it's only $50 (I think that's what I paid).

* Does everything * It's SO EASY to backup the cache files and the entire image database. It's as simple as copying files. * Fast operations (the included scripts can run a tad slow sometimes) * The "relocate" command works very well with my workflow. * Processes images very fast. * Supports all my cameras so far (D30, 10D, and G3)

* Does too much * I wish it had the "view" page always available instead of always having to click the view tab to see the cahed preview.

ACDSee tryouts, Adobe Photoshop Album demos, and a few others whose names I forgot.

I've used it a couple times because there were a few bugs I ran against. I could tell the author (Mario) did his best to help me out but one of the issues was never resolved because he was not able to witness the problem himself. I had a workaround and the problem went away when I upgraded my video card. I believe it was a driver problem for my old card. I've seen a few other bugs too but so far I've not had any data loss (which is important!)

With tens of thousands of images, I worried that I'd never be able to find the pictures I need in the future. It seemed that my hard drive was becoming a massive photo "shoe box." I could archive many images do CD, but that would only make them harder to find, requiring loading up each CD each time I wanted to browse through it, one picture at a time. A program with an online cache of thumbnail data would be needed, as well as some sort of keywording and searching features. I searched and downloaded many evaluation copies of image management programs, but they were all falling short. Many wouldn't retain thumbnail data, and others were too cumbersome in their application of standardized keywords. Finally I happened upon Photool's IMatch. The natural virtual folder category heirarchy was the organizational answer to the problem of the relatively primitive keyword philosophy. With the virtual folders, a single instance of an image on my disk could now "exist" in multiple IMatch folders, allowing me to categorize as broadly as needed. In order to keep this from blowing out of proportion, customizable multi-category "splasher" buttons can be created in order to assign logical sets of categories to a single image -- or images -- with a single click. When it comes to doing searches, the options are many. Complex and detailed queries can be constructed, saved, and reused in a variety of ways. More powerful still is the ability for the program to search the actual visible images themselves for matching or near matches, definable by the user, and regardless of differences in scale if you wish. And it does so unbelievably quickly. Even comparing the picture content of more than 25,000 pictures, I can get through it in seconds. What tops this off is the unbelievably remarkable level of support the author, Mario Westephal, gives to the users. Emails are promptly returned, typically the same day, with questions answered. Also, you can get answers from the very active IMatch group on Yahoo, which Mario reads and reponds on constantly, or from the wonderful support website (http://www.photools.com/). All in all, Photools is the Rolls Royce of image management systems, while at a Volkswagen price.

+ Innovative and intuitive category-based organization schema. + Lightning fast searches. + "Dynamic" categories folders capability. + Powerful built-in scripting language. + Can search images by actual image content. + Maintains seperate thumbnails database, including for offline material. + Powerful multiple table database design. + Customizeable multi-category assignment shortcut buttons. + Advanced auto web-album creation tools. + Extensive IPTC and EXIF data support. + Intelligent multiple file renaming feature. + Extremely comprehensive contextual help system and documentation. + Imports image data from other popular image management systems.

- The sheer volume of options gives IMatch a bit more of a learning curve than others.

ThumbsPlus, ACDSee, Exifer, Jasc Photo Album

Superlative. In the years I've dealt with software manufacturers as a professional in the IT business, I can count the number of acceptable companies with this high level of service on one hand. Mario's response time, knowledge of his product, and attitude are all top-of-the-line.

IMatch is the first and only image cataloging solution which will scale with your image management needs. I had tried numerous other applications including Portfolio, CompuPic, etc. but, they all started to lsow down after a couple of thousand images. IMatch was designed to support 100s of thousands. The categorization engine make it much more performant and flexible. If you want to catalog all your images with the people, place, years, events, etc. this is the package to get. Designed to scale with your image collection over many, many years.

Uses hierarchical categories as primary mechanism for cataloging (making it extremely fast). Additionally supports keyword text fields (defined by you). Full support for IPTC and EXIF data. It also supports a full scripting model for those inclined to customize and extend its functionality. Supports offline images to allow you to archive the high-resolution images for printing and keep screen resolution images online. As an example, you can tag your images with many categories, keywords and EXIF data. You can then query 15,000 images in lest than 2 seconds.

User interface could be a little cleaner. A better mechanism for associating raw images and their edited versions for display and printing.

Extensis Portfolio CompuPic Adobe PhotoAlbum

The best their is. Mario Westphal is the author and seems to be always monitoring the Yahoo Group ImatchUserForum. He is very responsive and supportive.

I´m a beginner to digital photograph, but not at computers. After testing a lot of software, this is simply the best for me.

Better then my own thoughts.

Understanding all the stuff.

There is no question unanswerd. The best i seen.

I am a professional photographer, located in Switzerland. I tried before Portfolio, Cumulus and Photo Album (Ulead). IMatch beats them all clearly. The programm is simply great, specialy the iptc-support is incredible (single- and multi-image-support). Another great feature is, that IMatch can be expanded with scripts. There comes a lot with the package and there are even more for downloading (made be other users). Also very interesting is the very good support for creating web-pages. Ah, yes, allmost forgot: With IMatch you can search of course for images in the usual way (like keywords, filenames, categories and so on), but IMatch can MORE: with this programm you can search for the image-content or you can even draw a scetch and search such images!! Take for example a brown cow in a green meadow and search for similar imgages: you will get a lot of similiar images without keywords or so, IMatch searches simply the image-content. Or draw with the mouse for example a yellow ground, and blue over the yellow. Done in 1 minute. Than search for images with this. Result: a lot of images at the sea with yellow sand and a blue sea or sky. (of course you must have such images ;) Really a very cool search, I found images, what I had in mind, drawed a sketch and found it, without have a hint for the filename or keywords. The best thing is for me also a VERY good support from the programmer. With IMatch you will not come in the situation, that you want do things, what cannot be done. What cried Tina Turner ;) simply the best.

IPTC-support. Included a script-language and lots of examples. Support for offline-images. A very clever categories-system. RAW-support. A very fast and interesting bookmark-system. Great search-functions (the usual AND direct image-comparison!!

only for PC (not Mac) several users can see and read one database over a network, but different users cannot write in this database over the network

Portfolio Photo Album (Ulead) Cumulus Fotostation Pro (only short)

Great. Maybe the best from all. The programmer himself (and other users) helps a lot on the IMatch-forum and this VERY quickly.