Overall Rating
 4 of 5

Used product for
1 Year

Summary:
Having spent 25 years in the darkroom, grinding through print after print, I was "digitally challenged" when digital photography became a realizable consumer activity. With the same number of years in computers, I'd only dabbled in digital imaging, because most of the processing products were cumbersome, expensive, and required a tremendous amount of patience. Within the past year, however, I've been in and out of five digital cameras, and my home systems have moved from ancient Macintoshes to the latest G3 with hi res scanner, CD-R drive, LOTS of memory, and outstanding color printing. My wife's now getting into it as well, and it may be a battle to see who's getting on the computer tonight! So what's the point? With all of this great enabling technology, you've got to have a methodoloy for keeping track of the hundreds, nay, thousands of digital images. It was bad enough in the manual systems of yesteryear (probably worse, cause you had hard copies of prints, proof sheets AND negatives to track, and finding that "one special photo" could take hours and sometimes days), but the "filing" problem has become exponentially worse because it's now so much easier to "be creative", generating images as fast as you can push the shutter or load the scanner. So, I went scouting around for some way of tracking these images. At one point (very low), I even considered writing a database in FileMaker Pro to track my creations. While this would have worked, I'm sure, there were multiple hours of design, development and coding staring me in the face. I'd been there, done that, and got the tee shirt! Fortunately, fate smiled (or was that a grimace?) and several photo database products surfaced, which I dutifully evaluated, and ultimately rejected for one reason or another. I'm fairly critical of user-interface, and many of the intitial releases were severely challenged... Finally (it's generally true that you find it in the last place you look), ImageAXS arrived on the scene. Admittedly, I was somewhat skeptical of the data sheets. I'd read the same material before, but this time was different. It actually performed as advertised. In many ways, ImageAXS is like the Adobe PhotoDeluxe of Image Storage. It's not intended for huge networked shops with multiple users (Canto's Cumulus addresses this need), but it does an excellent job of providing enough flexibility for the individual user or small shop. You can create multiple "Collections" (charterized, for example as "Outdoor Photos", "Family", etc), and you can create sub-categories or "Portfolios" of images within the collection. This is particularly useful when archiving on CD-R's as I do. Within the collection, you have the flexibility to label fields which describe each photo. Name, Camera info, lighting, or whatever, in addition to some standard fields that are provided like file size, resolution, etc. You can also add key words to each photo, based on what you decide will best describe the photo's "qualities". Acquisition of photos is fairly straight forward, and can be either through a Photoshop plug-in for scanners or directly from a storage device (hard disk, compact flash, ZIP, etc). One very nice feature is the ability to acquire multiple images at once by simply selecting a directory or (in Macintosh) a folder. Unfortunately, ImageAXS picks up all appropriate pictures within the folder, even if there's another folder inside that you cleverly named something else. ImageAXS captures virtually all data formats, like JPEG, TIFF, BMP, etc. which makes it highly versatile. The thumbnails that are generated have four different formats, B/W, Color and low/high resolution. You can print out "proof sheets" for hard copy filing. You can select and image or groups of images within the collection using previously assigned keywords, and the appropriate search criteria. Images are viewable by thumbnail, lists or individually. You can also double click on a thumbnail for full size viewing, and you can specify an image editor, like PhotoShop for direct editing capability. This is convenient. The one thing that ImageAXS DOESN'T allow you to do is to directly move pictures from one collection to another (drag and drop), and you can only have one collection open at a time. This means that you'll have to "reacquire" the same image in the new collection. If you need the drag and drop capability, then you should use ImageAXS PRO which is currently available for the PC but NOT the Mac (it's coming "real soon now"). I haven't found this to be a particularly bad thing, but I'm certainly going to check out the PRO version on the Mac when it's ready. The Digital Arts and Sciences people have created a great product which is intuitive, easy to understand and works! The one thing you've got to remember is that as with all data-base products, the performance is directly related to the data. The old GIGO ("Garbage In, Garbage Out") adage directly applies. For ImageAXS or any image database program to be useful, you need to spend time THINKING about how you're going to use the information; how you'd like to be able search/retrieve the information and then spend time CORRECTLY categorizing each and every photo that you entrust to its care. The really cool thing to do, if you're archiving on CD-R is to create a "Collection" for each folder of photos, then stick that on the CD-R when you record the disk. That way, your collection is somewhat "self-documenting". Just double-click on the collection, and voila! All the thumnails appear. I also keep a COMPLETE collection of all photos on my hard disk which lets me know which CD the photo is located on as well. If you're publishing photos on CD's, DAS has created another userful tool: CD IMAGEAXS, which allows the publisher to create "run-time" collections that can be installed without forcing the user to have the original ImageAXS program. I haven't used this program yet, so I'll reserve judgement, however, it certainly "reads" well. I'm very pleased with ImageAXS and highly recommend it.

Strengths:
None

Weaknesses:
None

Similar Products Used:
None