One of the main arguments for switching from film to digital photography is that digital offers the chance to overcome an age-old problem: the storage of photographs.
How many people do you know who have taken thousands of traditional photos only to leave them languishing in the paper envelopes the developing lab put them in? Some people might get around to filing them away properly in photo albums, or even hanging the best ones on the wall.
But too many of our photographic memories are doomed to spend years in shoeboxes and drawers, seeing the light of day only on special occasions when someone has the bright idea to take a look at them.
For many consumers, just mentioning words like media management is enough to send them running away screaming. These are the people who have bought digicams because they're cheap and easy; they may well have given no consideration to managing their photos in any meaningful manner.
This is a pity, because unless the digicam generation takes some action now to make proper, useful photo archives, it is going to be in something of a muddle in 30 years' time, when it collectively tries to relive its younger days and finds that nothing is labeled or captioned properly.
I speak from personal experience. I've owned a digital camera since 1998, and I failed to keep archives of any sort for the first couple of years. My archives from 2000 and onward exist but are in pretty shabby condition. The most I have ever managed to do with the pictures is file them into meaningful folders (well, they mean something to me), but few images are captioned, and they have very little metadata associated with them. Often, because I was too lazy to reset the time and date on the camera, they have the wrong date as well.
Photos are meant to be viewed. That's one of the main reasons I bought a digital camera. It was an Agfa e1280, which was state-of-the-art at the time but now is something of a clunky museum piece. It's still in regular use, though.
Digital photos are, in theory, easier to share with people because they can be flung so easily from one computing device to another. So I find it even more of a shame when I encounter people (and with the rapid rise of interest in digital photography, there are more of them every day) who treat their digital shots the same way they used to treat their prints: rather than languishing in a drawer, the pictures languish on a hard disk. They still don't get to see the light of day.
If you're one of these photographers, or (more likely) you know someone with this shameful habit, this article is for you.
We're going to take a look at a few digital shoeboxes for both Mac and Windows (even though I'm starting with the Mac-only iPhoto because of its impact on the market). But this isn't a case of consigning photos to the box and forgetting about them; we want an electronic shoebox that helps us search, sort, and organize our pictures--an all-singing, all-dancing shoebox that, far from being just a storage medium, can help us with the time-consuming stuff and make photo sharing easy again.
Remove your lens caps; it's time to get snapping.
Apple's iPhoto application (Mac OS X, $49 as part of iLife) is the standard by which we should measure the competition. After all, it's the default, the first and only digital image management program that most Mac OS X users are going to encounter. To really get an understanding of whether rival apps are any good, we need to see what iPhoto does best.
Its greatest strength is its simplicity (see Figure 1). Plug in a camera, and zap! It sucks out all your latest images and shows them to you. Any app that my mom can use without needing any prior instruction pretty much defines simplicity in my book.
Figure 1. iPhoto is simplicity itself
The fact that it can make a nicely bound printed book, as well as export web galleries (that's a standard feature in any photo management app these days) and manage and edit the images in the library, makes it an excellent consumer-level shoebox. Anyone starting out with a brand-new digital camera, especially someone like my mom who knows little about computers, is going to find image management a breeze.
|
Related Reading 
iPhoto 4: The Missing Manual |
And with extras like Smart Albums and Rendezvous network support thrown in, there's something in iPhoto for more experienced computer users too.
Where iPhoto starts to fall down is in dealing with very large image collections. Someone who has been taking digital snaps for years can very easily have tens of thousands of images, and iPhoto does slow down when it has to work on that sort of scale. (iPhoto 4 is far and away your best option for big libraries; it's much more robust than previous versions.) It also makes copies of the original photo files and stores them in its own proprietary way, in the Pictures folder. Anyone with limited space on their hard disk will find this a problem after a few years of importing pictures.
Both of these drawbacks inevitably mean iPhoto is going to appeal more to newbies and not as much to established photographers, amateur or professional--unless they're willing to use workarounds such as iPhoto Library Manager. People with lots of pictures may want an app that is natively more robust. That's where the real fun starts.
A Mac standard for years, iView MediaPro is now a cross-platform application (Windows/Mac, $199). Designed from the outset as a means of managing large collections of multimedia files, it is superbly fast and does an excellent job of simplifying image browsing.
Your first task is to create a catalog or series of catalogs. Although MediaPro can cope very well with extremely large catalogs of many thousands of files, it might make your life easier if you choose to subdivide your image collection into small chunks. I store mine in a simple chronological hierarchy, so I created separate iView catalogs for each year's worth of photos.
Then sit back and marvel at the blistering speed of this application. It cataloged 656 of my images (287MB of data) in under 30 seconds, creating a new, 4.2MB catalog file. That was on a Powerbook G4 running Panther--the same test on a G3 iBook was much, much slower.
The hidden power of this program lies in the way it can manage the text-based information associated with photos. The information panel offers a multitude of data options, including the picture data assigned by the camera, and editable fields such as People, Keywords, Categories, and Captions.
The Organize panel lets you browse your files using the metadata you've associated. It also makes management very easy with drag and drop. Having created your own data sets (people, places, and so on), you can drag single images or groups of images onto them. Sound familiar? It's a bit like creating a playlist in iTunes.
While viewing and managing images is incredibly quick in iView, editing them is less so, and that's where a few frustrations kick in.
The app has a very capable set of image-editing controls, but they are hidden away behind the Window menu. Once activated, the separate image-editing palette is very mouse driven and lacks swift keyboard shortcuts. For anyone wanting to zip through a large batch of new images, editing and perfecting each of them on the fly, this is likely to get tiresome very quickly. Calling up the image-editing palette is easy (press Cmd-Y), but once it's up you still need to use the mouse to activate each editing function.
That said, the quality of the editing tools is excellent, and the results of the Auto Enhancement control are particularly pleasing (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. An iView catalog; speed counts
I loved seeing what MediaPro could do and how speedily it could do it. But actually spending the time making it all happen, with the mousing around required, made me frustrated and got my arm aching. There's also no way to customize the toolbar; it would be nice to be able to add some favorite editing functions there.
Put the editing to one side, though, because as a manager and sorter of images, iView does a superb job. It really does work very quickly, and the search system (activated from a box on the toolbar) is accurate and swift. Even with a collection of poorly labeled images, it was able to make a stab at finding what I wanted purely by using the names of folders from which images had been imported.
It can do plenty with images, such as making backup CDs, playing slide shows, and creating web galleries. This last option comes with a handful of predesigned templates for the lazy/busy people with no time to create their own layout.
This application is not the kind of digital shoebox that will suit everybody. It can do the job more than well, but it requires attention to detail and a degree of concentration. It's got Pro in its name for a reason; it's a tool for professionals and people who spend vast amounts of time with digital media. If all you want to do is manage your holiday snapshots, it could be said that using iView to do it is a bit like using Word as your email editor--overkill.
There is, of course, iView Media2, which is the nonpro version of the product. Its interface is much the same; it just lacks some of MediaPro's more advanced features, and the maximum catalog size is 8,000 items, considerably less than MediaPro's 128,000.
|
I'll confess right at the start that I hadn't heard of Photo Mechanic (Windows/Mac, $150) before I started working on this article. This application performs well and makes lots of tasks quick and simple, but the interface is odd and there are one or two strange bugs.
This app is for separating wheat from chaff. The idea is that you load up a "contact sheet" of new images (just drag in a folder's worth), then flick through it to decide what's worth using and what should be consigned to the bin.
What's nice is the way you can pick out the good stuff easily. Press Cmd-plus key (Mac) to "tag" an image, then flick the view control so that you see only the tagged items. More powerful still, you can use another shortcut to assign an image a color-coded label. It makes it very swift to whiz through a couple of hundred pictures and pick out everything related to one subject, which you can then view with everything else filtered out.
And it really is fast. Photo Mechanic takes no time at all to pull in a large folder's worth of images, and it renders thumbnail views with no delay (see Figure 3). You can change the size of the thumbnails using a slider in the toolbar.
Figure 3. Photo Mechanic in browse mode
Selected and tagged images can be emailed or sent to an FTP server from within the application--a nice touch. A group of images can be saved elsewhere, with metadata and cropping intact. It's easy to select a number of photos and export a web album or even a detailed XML file containing every snippet of metadata--potentially very useful for archivists. Lots of nice features are built into Photo Mechanic.
The edit mode is also responsive and usable, just not very nice to look at, and it sometimes can feel bewildering. I found myself thinking, I've done a whole pile of stuff with my photos ... so now what?
Unfortunately there's no means of editing an image beyond cropping or rotating it. If you want to edit the color balance or the contrast, you'll have to use another program.
Plus, the interface is tricky to come to grips with (see Figure 4). There's power in this application, but it can be hard to find.
Figure 4. Viewing an image in Photo Mechanic
You need to beware of bugs, too. On opening the Connect to FTP dialog, I was unable to dismiss it without quitting the app. And my registration code did not seem to be accepted; I had to reenter it every time I started the program. Oh, and there are no preferences to change.
Little niggles, I'm sure, and the kinds of problems that the developers might easily and quickly fix in future releases; but I thought it was worth warning you before you headed off to download it.
Portfolio (Windows/Mac, $200), like MediaPro, is a professional-quality tool for managing digital files. The working environment is broadly similar, using a system of thumbnailed catalogs and metadata. Version 7 has a slew of tools and features.
You can view images in a variety of ways, including a list or a contact sheet of thumbnails (see Figure 5). Adding keywords is quick and easy. Cmd-I brings up the Properties box for a picture, into which you can merrily type the info you like. Alternatively, call up the Keywords dialog with Cmd-Option-K, then type in a bunch of words and press Return. This speed makes it easy to zip through a large number of pictures quickly, and it requires little or no use of the mouse--a boon for keyboard-centrics like me.
Figure 5. Previewing images from a catalog in Portfolio
In fact, the whole application is very keyboard-oriented. Pretty much every function has a Cmd control equivalent, something I was delighted to discover.
For the mouse-oriented user, the drag-and-drop filing of images into Galleries (again, the iTunes analogy fits perfectly here) is simple and is another effective way of sorting through huge catalogs.
There are some other nice extras. As well as exporting web galleries, Portfolio does a good job of turning a bunch of pictures into a QuickTime movie. It can also burn to disk all by itself; no extra CD-burning software is required.
Portfolio does need some processing power to operate smoothly, it seems. On the test Powerbook G4, it worked like a dream. In contrast, on my older G3 iBook it was sluggish and crashed while importing images into a new catalog. In that respect iView has the edge, because it performed without problems on both machines.
What Portfolio lacks is image-editing tools. Choose the Edit command while viewing a catalog, and the chosen picture is opened in Apple's Preview app--hardly a professional-level image-editing application. (Oddly, if you preview an image within Portfolio, then Ctrl-click it and pick Edit from the resulting menu, you are given the chance to choose an editing application of your own. Why a user should want to edit using Preview while browsing images, and edit using a different app while examining them in detail, is not clear.)
Overall, though, Portfolio is very appealing. It looks completely at home on Mac OS X, with a customizable toolbar and a Panther-like interface you'd find on a zillion other applications. iView MediaPro, by contrast, betrays its roots and still looks just like its Classic Mac OS forebears. Not an issue for some users, I know, but things like this stand out.
In this article we've taken the liberty of clumping together a bunch of applications with wide-ranging prices, feature sets, and capabilities. But if we're honest, none of these programs is really competing with the others. They are all designed for slightly different tasks and just happen to share some central features.
The upshot is that each offers a subset of users something the other programs lack. Consequently, if you are looking for an application to do a particular job, it will help if you first think carefully about the precise features you need.
For example, if you already have a favorite image editor--Photoshop (Windows/Mac) will probably apply here for many; I happen to prefer Graphic Converter (Mac) myself--there's no need for you to worry about image-editing features in your digital shoebox. iPhoto might be fine if your collection is small, or iView if it is large and you don't mind paying money to solve this problem. Someone wishing to archive a large number of images and apply keywords and other metadata to them will appreciate Portfolio's speed and power.
Make clear to yourself exactly what it is you need a digital shoebox to do before you decide to go with a particular product.
My choice would be to combine simplicity with speed and a set of decent editing tools. I want to be able to do everything within one application and do it fast. My perfect digital shoebox probably doesn't exist, but then I'm a fussy sort of person. I'd like the simplicity of iPhoto with the speed of iView MediaPro and the interface of Portfolio.
Many other people are happy to edit in one app and manage in another, and that makes a lot of sense when you have a software landscape made up of excellent image editors and image managers.
All of these applications offer ways of tagging photos and searching or viewing them using subsets of the tags. All of them work very well at organizing data on a disk or network, but there are still new directions for digital photo management to take in the future. By annotating photos with RDF and connecting the output to RSS feeds, it would be possible to create semantic web shoeboxes of images. Web-based management is already here in the form of services like Flickr, which allows people to share photos among friends they choose or simply with common tags. The resulting RSS feeds can be used to further distribute the images.
Image management in a web browser? You never know; it might just catch on.
Copyright © 2009 O'Reilly Media, Inc.