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

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iView Media Pro manages large image collections, and it's very fast


July 16, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   I love iPhoto, but I've given up on my plans to catalog all my digital photos -- I have tens of thousands -- in iPhoto catalogs. I found a program that overcomes the biggest weakness of iPhoto, and I've switched my allegiance.
   The software that captured my heart is iView Media Pro. It excels at just the thing that cripples iPhoto -- large libraries of photos. Even on my G4 Macintosh, with dual processors and the latest version of OS X, scrolling one of my iPhoto libraries can take five or six seconds just to get the window to respond, and moving photos from the main library to one of the albums on the left can take a couple of minutes.
   Don't let me scare you into giving up on iPhoto if your image collection differs from mine. The problems I have are compounded by two things: I never store my images as JPEGs, which are relatively small files, but rather as TIFFs or PNGs, which are much larger; and all my images are rather big, ranging from 20 to 60 megabyte files on average. (Some are as large as 240 megs.)
   No doubt iPhoto was designed for the small JPEG files that most users have. But when I load up an iPhoto library of 50 to 60 images averaging 20 megabytes or more, iPhoto groans. One iPhoto library -- I have many, for easy storage -- takes up more than 9 gigabytes. I can make a cup of coffee and feed the puppy while it loads.
   iView Media Pro is nothing like that. It can open a gargantuan library of photos within a second or two. It can scroll from the top to the bottom of a catalog of thousands of photos, doing a live scroll from image to image, in a few seconds. Its thumbnail display is even sharper than the already excellent thumbnail quality in iPhoto, and, best of all, it preserves the file-and-folder arrangement of your photos in your own easy-to-find photo folders -- in utter contrast to iPhoto, which hides its images in a bizarre hierarchy of folders that you are obviously never meant to traverse yourself.
   iView Media Pro was designed solely for Macintosh computers (the discontinued Mac OS and Mac OS X), but a less-capable version, iView Media, is available for Windows and well as both Mac operating systems. (A Windows version of iView Media Pro is under development, but the release date is not certain.)
   iView Media Pro is $90; iView Media is $30. You can download trial versions from www.iview-multimedia.com. If you are an avid digital photographer (or have a huge collection of scanned images) or if you are in charge of a library's image collection, iView Media Pro is the obvious choice. Otherwise the non-pro version might be adequate. (Among other liabilities, the non-pro version can't handle more than 8,000 items per catalog and won't catalog RAW camera files, Postscript files or PDF documents the way the pro version can.
   The pro version has a limit of 32,000 items per catalog. If that seems too low for your requirements, remember that iView is very fast, and switching from one catalog to another takes no appreciable time. iView can have many catalogs open at the same time, and a single click will switch from one catalog window to another.
   iView Media Pro excels at annotations and comments. You can easily add them to any photo, and searches based on annotations or comments are a simple matter. Double-clicking a thumbnail in the catalog shows the image itself. When an image is being viewed, pressing the left or right arrow key navigates to the previous or next image in the catalog. You can drop down a menu of programs that will open a selected image, and you can also change the default action of the double click.
   iView media Pro creates thumbnail catalogs very quickly. You can make its thumbnails very small or any size up to 320 pixels wide and deep. I have many iView Media pro catalogs that have twin database files -- one with small thumbnails and one with huge ones. The small views are better when I am searching for images, and the large ones are better when I am editing photos.
   I haven't given up on iPhoto -- I still use it for general photo collections -- but I do all my serious work on my digital photo collections using iView Media Pro. It's fast and very competent. Isn't that what a Mac is all about anyway?