Portfolio 7
For $50, Apple will gladly sell you a copy of iPhoto as part of it’s iLife suite. iPhoto is a great program;if you have a digital camera, it will easily let you organize, edit, and share your photos. For most people, this is all you will ever need. However,if you are a professional (or semi-pro) photographer, or if you are a graphic designer or web editor who needs to keep track of thousands of digital photos, clip art pieces, or graphics (and possibly share them with others in real time), iPhoto’s limitations will quickly become apparent.
Software developer Extensis has stepped into this void with their application Portfolio which is designed for the professional – or pack-rat amateur who has moved beyond iPhoto. Portfolio is not a replacement for the consumer features of iPhoto. It doesn’t include any editing functions (as a pro or semi-pro, you use Photoshop or something similar, right?), or the ability to order prints, or automatic easy web sharing with dot.Mac. What Portfolio does offer is the ability to easily classify tens of thousands of files in a wide variety of graphics formats, to share these files with others, and to quickly search and find files based on numerous criteria, including custom tags.
Portfolio is very fast, even with several thousand files. As a test, I imported about 2000 digital photos and about 3000 other graphics files, and the searching and moving among the various folders was much faster then iPhoto. Searching for a needle in this digital haystack is quite easy. You can of course tag files based on their type or subject, but Portfolio also tracks files based on several dozen other criteria, making it easy to create customized searches and find the exact file you are looking for. Portfolio also contains support for advanced functions such as integration with third-party SQL databases, workflow automation, file format conversion,and Adobe’s Digital Negative file format.
When it comes time to share your database - either with other members of your team or potential clients — Portfolio gives you several options. At the simplest, you can export selected items to a web site, and Portfolio provides several nice templates and more flexibility in this task then iPhoto’s built-in reliance on dot.Mac. For a more sophisticated approach, you can publish a live version of your entire library or selected items to the web in real-time using a companion program, Portfolio Server, which does cost extra.
Finally,you can burn your library to a CD or DVD both for backup or to share with others. Extensis provides a free read-only version of Portfolio (useable on both Mac and Windows) to make sharing and distribution of your images easier.
Portfolio is not perfect. The user interface has some glitches and in many areas is non-intuitive, and it is missing many consumer-level features like the ability to order prints and do basic photo-editing. However, if you are a professional designer, photographer or artist with thousands of files to keep track of, Portfolio may be just what you need. Portfolio 7, published by Extensis (www.extensis.com) $200.00, Requires a G4 processor and MacOS X 10.3 or higher.
Pros: A powerful and full-featured professional image management application
Cons: Rough interface in spots, missing some beginner features.
4 out of 5 dogcows