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photo archiving software

December 1, 2005

our companys image archive is now on about 50’000 pictures. everthing is archived in a somewhat freestyle manner, so we really need a solution that makes it easy to handle pictures with keywords, categories et all. first thing i did was to google around for about 5 hours yesterday evening. there’s plenty of image archive solutions out there, but regarding most reviews and user comments, there are 4 “big players” amongst them.

the first one i found was iview media pro. it’s a rather sleek solution which is available both for windows and osx. it catalogues images in an external catalogue file that you can burn onto a cd and send to customers, agencies or whatever, including a free catalogue viewer. the only problem about that: the best thing for us would be a centralised databased solution. only 1 user can have write access to the file at once, all others just can read the catalogue file. overall: it’s easy to use, installed in a second, very fast at importing thousands of images and last but not least very interesting from the price point of view.

the second soft i stumbled across was canto cumulus. it’s available in a lot of different tastes. home user, workgroup, enterprise .. etc. it’s a server-based solution, also crossplatform clients (osx/win). i didn’t install this one because it seems to have just the same functionality as iview. and the price. well, the price..

the third one is a mac only archiving software: qpict. from the usability point of view, this was my favourite application. it’s really really simple and powerful, the price is very interesting aswell, but there’s no way i could use that for our company, since it’s only available for mac. too bad.

the 4th one: extensis portfolio. i tested this one quite some time ago and it wasn’t really satisfying. for example, it took me about 3 hours to import 4-5000 images. and afterall, it crashed about 3 times while importing. that’s not really what i call stable software. so.. you have to decide yourself.

i think we will give iview a try. i already found a good ressource for it: bildverwaltung.uttx.net (german only)

so, would be nice if you could comment this, i don’t really know if there’s some underdog-software out there which can handle everything much better than those i found. it doesn’t seems so, but you never know.. :)