iView MediaPro 3

iView MediaPro3 falls into the "Digital Asset management" category. It creates catalogs of media (images, layouts, illustrations, videos, audio) and lets you store them locally, while allowing local or off-site storage of the original files. It supports a broad range of formats, and can catalog pretty much anything that anyone with digital media would need to catalog. But iView's real power lies in its clear focus on the photographer. The workflow of the program is as follows. Import images into a new or pre-existing database. Organize the images any way you want, by keywords, by "catalog sets" (think of these as sub-catalogs contained in the master catalog) or by a large selection of other methods, and rate and annotate them. Where this program shines compared to the competition is in the way the toolset that is most used, the organization and annotation, is always displayed prominently at the edge of the screen. Organizing is a matter of defining parameters and simply dragging and dropping. And annotation, easily the most time-consuming process of managing large amounts of images, can be automated with the help of "vocabulary" sets (preset entries in a drop down) and templates. Upon import, you can select a template to be applied to all the items, and you can pick and chose what parts of the template get applied before you start importing, so you get some flexibility there. But unlike in other programs that I've tried, the annotation fields are part of the main interface, not buried in a menu somewhere. This allows me to very transparently view and edit annotations, saving me a lot of time. I can also select several images with similar content and annotate them all at once, from the same interface panel. I can edit three of 500 in one swoop, and that was the biggest selling point for me. Although the thumbnail generation is not fast, it is also not slow. I chose this over Photo Mechanic because I just don't need the blazing speed of the latter, but I do need the cataloging and easy annotation capabilities. Browsing through images is quick enough, but I do wish it was faster. Adobe Lightroom beta has blazing preview generation, and I hope iView will try to compete with that, as it does improve the user experience. That's why I gave the "performance" rating 4 out of 5.

Catalog flexibility Featureset geared towards photographers Media format support Local storage of thumbnails, metadata and screen previews 128,000 item catalog limit Built-in archiving to CD/DVD using the OS-native burning systems

slower than a dedicated browser due to database structure, I hope they work on this to bring it on par with Adobe Lightoom 2 gigabyte catalog file size limit Thumbnail size is determined by the user and requires regeneration to introduce any changes. Not sure how one can work around that while still keeping the catalog file size to a manageable level, I think it's the only way they were able to do it at this time.

Extensis Portfolio Adobe Lightroom beta Photo Mechanic (just a great browser, but I did compare it)

good so far, frequent updates