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iView Media Pro excels at image management.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Digital photo workflow, Part 2: iView Media Pro can find duplicates among thousands of pictures


Feb. 15, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

 
I have a hard time finding my keys. You might imagine that I'm a hopeless idiot when it comes to locating one or two digital pictures among the thousands in our family collection.
 
But I can find any of our images in less than a minute. Our image collection, unlike my dresser drawer, is organized extraordinarily well. I use the iView Media Pro image-management program and a lot of recordable CDs and DVDs.
 
As I explained last week, I always make backup copies of all my original images. I make new copies in TIF format of all the images worth editing. I don't have many rejects, so I usually end up with the original (a JPEG) and a TIF copy for just about every picture I take.
 
That's a lot of pictures, and they take up a lot of space. My JPEGs are only a few megabytes each, but the TIFFs tend to be about 16 megabytes. A few hundred JPEG originals would fit on a single CD, but the edited TIFFs would need a great deal more storage space -- about 4 gigabytes. Rather than span the edited versions across a half-dozen CDs, I'd put them on a single DVD.
 
But I don't just copy the image files to my storage disks. I make catalogs using iView Media Pro and then copy the images and their catalogs to blank CDs or DVDs. iView Media Pro's catalogs contain information listings and thumbnail views of each photo in the catalog. I keep copies of each catalog in the "Pictures" folder of my main computer.
 
iView Media Pro, from www.iview-multimedia.com, excels at image management. Thumbnails can be large or small or any size in between, and you can sort images by date, name, keyword, size or -- my favorite method -- by similarity. The "similarity" function isn't called that, however; it's hidden under the "Find" menu and is listed as "Find Duplicates." Amazingly, iView Media Pro easily finds duplicates among thousands of pictures. (The software doesn't care if similar photos have different names and are different sizes; it will track them down and show them side by side.)
 
To display an image, I simply double click its thumbnail. A configuration menu provides a way to open selected images in various programs through a Ctrl-click or right click, so I can edit them instead of viewing them. iView Media Pro recognizes all the standard image and video formats, and it can catalog fonts, texts, HTML (Web) pages and PDF documents, too.
 
I'm an unabashed fan of iView Media Pro for a few more reasons, too. It's fast, making thumbnails of JPEGs almost instantly. Catalogs containing 10,000 images snap open without a delay. It's handles slide shows nicely, too.
 
Because iView Media Pro catalogs are self-contained collections of image thumbnails and other data such as image names and descriptions, you can browse through the catalogs even if you don't have the actual pictures handy.
 
This is very important. You can store your iView catalogs in a folder on your computer while you keep the pictures they refer to on CDs or DVDs. When you need to get a picture, you simply locate it in the catalog and grab the disk it is linked to. (The physical location of each selected image is displayed in the catalog.)
 
Because I do all my work on an OS X Macintosh, I also enjoy using Apple's excellent iPhoto image manager. The current version is much faster than previous versions and can handle more photos, but it's not suited for the kind of cataloging I want to do. To me, a good image cataloger must be able to deal with off-line photos (ones not physically located on your computer) and should be able to locate duplicate images.
 
In those two areas, iView Image Pro is clearly ahead.
 
Next: Printing photos the right way.