A Quick Guide to Digital Shoeboxes
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A Different Tool: Photo Mechanic

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.

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.

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.

A Powerful Tool: Extensis Portfolio

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.

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.

Conclusions: Define Your Needs

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.