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This article is from September 20, 2004, and is no longer current.

iView MediaPro 2.6: Quick Cataloging of Many Media for Both Platforms

The best media-creation tools in the world are of dubious value if you’ve amassed so much media that you can’t find the particular image, illustration, or video clip that you need. For a while, iView MediaPro has been one of the best media cataloging programs available. Now with version 2.6, the Windows and Mac versions have complete feature and interface parity, making the program more viable for mixed-platform environments.
iView has staked out a very strong middle ground in the media asset marketplace. Offering substantially more power than simple image browsers like Apple’s iPhoto, MediaPro competes very favorably feature-wise with high-end products like Canto Cumulus and Extensis Portfolio. However, because it lacks a server option, the package may not be appropriate for large-scale environments. For most users though, including small to mid-sized workgroups, MediaPro is an ideal media management tool.
Cataloging Stuff
iView MediaPro can catalog more than 100 different media formats including just about every modern still-image format you can think of, as well as vector-image formats, HTML pages, PDF files, QuickTime and AVI movies, and even fonts. With version 2.6, MediaPro now supports most of the existing digital camera Raw formats, which means you can quickly catalog your Raw images — complete with thumbnails — without having to go through a time-consuming Raw conversion process.

Figure 1: iView MediaPro can read a tremendous number of media types, and more can be added easily via its plug-in architecture.

You can create or add to a catalog by simply dropping a volume or folder into MediaPro. The program can be configured to generate its own thumbnails, or use any thumbnails that may be included in your original file. Obviously, using included thumbnails makes for faster cataloging, but MediaPro’s handmade thumbnails are higher quality and don’t significantly slow down the cataloging process. The program can also import directly from your digital camera or media card.
Cataloging is very speedy and iView has some clever optimizations that make the cataloging process feel faster. For example, when cataloging Illustrator EPS documents, it will grab the low-resolution 8-bit preview right away, and then generate a higher-quality one after it’s done importing your current batch of media.
MediaPro’s support for image metadata is extensive and thorough. In addition to the standard IPTC annotations, MediaPro also supports Adobe’s new XMP annotation standard. Such extensive annotation support means that you can easily tag your images with everything from personal credits and copyright information to detailed categorization terms.
You can specify many of these tags before you import a batch of photos, allowing you to automatically tag a camera or media card-load of images as they’re imported. For further automated import, you can tell the program to watch a particular folder, and automatically catalog any new items added to it.
Unlike lower-end applications such as Apple’s iPhoto, iView MediaPro does not copy any media into its own database. Instead, it simply stashes away a small thumbnail with a reference to the original file’s location. This means you can use MediaPro to catalog items that are stored off-line on external volumes or servers. The program’s catalogs are very small; after adding roughly 1,500 digital images, the resulting catalog was only 13.5 MB. (iPhoto users can easily migrate to MediaPro, thanks to a new facility that imports iPhoto albums.)
iView, uView
With version 2.6. MediaPro’s main interface has been streamlined and re-organized. Two simple tabs let you switch between viewing your catalog as thumbnails or in a list, while a third lets you view your original media (assuming it’s available; if it’s not, then MediaPro will prompt you to mount the appropriate volume). A collapsible pane on the left side of the window provides two different sets of data. The Info view lets you view all of the metadata information about the selected item. This includes not only metadata information that you might have added — keywords, XMP annotations, etc. — but any EXIF information that your digital camera might have included with the image.
The Info view lets you add any new annotations, and provides a large Caption field for entering any relevant notes or captions. Annotations are divided into categories – EXIF, People, Keywords, etc. – and you can easily hide and show different sets of annotations.
Switching to Organize view lets you easily create new metadata tags for organizing your catalog. Though you can add keywords and tags to individual items using the Info view, Catalog view is faster and easier for quickly tagging and organizing your catalog.


Figure 2: MediaPro’s Organize view lets you quickly create categories and drop items into them. You can immediately filter your catalog by clicking on a specific category (detail below).

For example, you can open the Event category and define a new event, then drag any relevant items on top of that event to add them to that category. Each item can belong to as many different groups as you like, and when you select an item, each associated tag turns bold.
You can easily re-arrange a catalog by simply dragging image thumbnails into new locations, and MediaPro provides a robust facility for combining and merging catalogs. In addition, XMP tags and keywords can be exported and synced with other files, allowing you to create consistent cataloging methods across multiple catalog files.


Figure 3: Info view lets you view the tags and media info for selected items within the catalog (detail below).

There are many ways to search a MediaPro catalog. Click on an annotation in the Organize pane and the program immediately filters your view to only show elements that are in that category. A search box at the top of each window lets you quickly enter a text string that the program will automatically search on. For more complex searches, you’ll want to use the Find dialog, which allows you to look for particular metadata tags and create multi-criteria Boolean queries.
Version 2.6 includes a new State of View navigation facility that lets you quickly switch between different catalog states. Roughly analogous to the forward and back arrows in your Web browser, State of View navigation is a handy feature that lets you work forward and back through various search states that you might have created.
Overall, iView MediaPro’s interface improvements are well implemented and the new window design is very easy to understand and quick to navigate. Tagging and cataloging items is very simple, as is reading EXIF data and media info. iView MediaPro provides so many ways to create, organize, and search a catalog, that you should have little trouble fitting it into whatever workflow you prefer.
It Catalogs! It Prints! It Juliennes!
iView has done a good job of adding additional features to MediaPro without compromising its core cataloging functions. While the program’s main function is to catalog and organize, there are lots of handy utility functions that you can perform within the program, allowing you to further streamline your production workflow, be it print, Web, or video.
For presentations, you can easily create slide shows, export Web galleries, or print contact sheets. Version 2.6 adds good XML export for publishing your catalog to the Web, while the program’s file-conversion capabilities make it simple to batch convert images from one format to another.
If you’ve already got a high-powered image editor like Adobe Photoshop, the need for image editing in your cataloging program might seem a little redundant. Nevertheless, being able to perform simple edits such as cropping, sharpening, rotation, and red-eye removal to batches of images can be very handy. MediaPro’s image editing features yield good results, so you don’t have to worry about compromising quality by performing basic tasks in MediaPro rather than in your image editor. The lossless rotation capability is particularly handy, as it allows you to rotate JPEGs without opening and re-compressing them.
New to version 2.6 is a one-click auto enhancement tool, which provides auto-Levels and color adjustments. While you might not want to use this feature for more sophisticated editing tasks, for quickly punching up batches of snapshots, it’s very effective.
Though MediaPro packs a lot of extra editing power, we’d still like to see it display one more piece of information. For cataloging bracketed photos, the addition of a histogram display would be extremely helpful, as it would allow you to quickly pick which image of a bracketed set you might want to take into your image editing program.
Finally, MediaPro facilitates a complex, sophisticated workflow thanks to its robust scripting support. On the Mac, MediaPro is fully AppleScriptable, allowing you to create automated image cataloging and processing workflows. On Windows, this same functionality is achieved through support for Microsoft Visual Basic and JavaScript. Kudos to iView for providing support for both of these standards.
Conclusion
iView has been making great cataloging software for the Macintosh for several years, and version 2.6 further refines this already excellent product. Unless you need a sophisticated client/server architecture, iView MediaPro should prove to be an ideal cataloging tool, whether you’re a Mac or Windows user, while the unified feature set and interface now make it a viable tool for mixed-platform environments.

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