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Hi gang. I'm beginning to build up a library of stock photos and illustrations and need some way to really organize them. Right now I view them in Adobe Bridge but thought an actual program dedicated to it might be better. Am I wrong in thinking this? The new web designer we hired previously used iPhoto to organize her assets but she hasn't had the time to show me how she did this. Personally, I hate iPhoto, but if it handles this particular task well, I'm willing to give it a shot. So, the questions are:
+ What low cost or free asset management apps do you use and recommend or even hate?
+ Should I just keep using Adobe Bridge and just tag the hell out of my files?
+ If you use the iPhoto method like my coworker, can you possibly impart this knowledge on me?
+ What is your work flow for asset management? I've never done this before really and would like to learn.
Thanks for any leads y'all.
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I've been using Portfolio for years to catalog and manage the archives
of the design firm I freelance at. It can handle just about any file format
you can throw at it -- our assets consist of everything from entire websites
to just about any image, graphics, layout, presentation, animation, video
or document file format used on Mac or Windows platforms, and it can be
organized, previewed, inspected, keyworded, and otherwise metadata'd
to your heart's content. Workflow currently consists more or less of taking
jobs off our work server when finished, copying to the archive RAID 5 connected
to a Mac OS X server which hosts the Portfolio server, letting Portfolio catalog
the jobs according to which client it was for. Designers can then use the
Portfolio catalogs as a front end to view and retrieve files or jobs from archive
as needed. Portfolio can be used as a single-user product too.
Canto Cumulus is also good, but I've barely used it.
iView is now a Microsoft product, FWIW, called Expression Media.
Being Microsoft, its website requires you to use Microsoft's Silverlight
to find out more about it.
Peter Krogh's "The DAM Book" is worth looking at, though it's oriented towards
the needs of photographers.
I've been using Lightroom for my photography here in my home studio, and used
to use Bridge. Bridge CS3 is pretty powerful -- I used Bridge CS2 for a long time
and keyworded and metadat'd thousands of photos with it.
It all depends on if you're just dealing with images or a wider variety of files.
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I use iView and am very happy with it. It isn't too cheap, however. Its likely iPhoto will do what you need unless your needs are pretty heavy. iView tends to be the choice for photographers with tens of thousands of images and hundreds of keywords. Lots of good info in Peter Krogh's forum as mentioned above. You probably don't need to read his whole book.
You are on the right track in thinking Bridge isn't so great, and yes, you would need to tag the heck out of them.
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Thanks for the responses guys. I'm dealing with photos, illustrations, and a maybe a few Flash files here and there. Do you know if it can handle illustrations as well? I only have about 1.2 GB of images right now but should be buying and expanding pretty soon.
Right now, I have iPhoto 6 on my MacBook Pro. Is it worth upgrading to version 8 or can I do the same things (except events)? A significant number of people on the board have been having issues with version 8, it seems.
I *think* my MacBook Pro came with an iLife upgrade CD because I only bought a month ago anyway, so I might be able to get my hands on iPhoto 7 that way.
As for Extensis, I'm not sure if I'm ready to trust them again after Suitcase, but thank you for the suggestion nonetheless.
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iPhoto 8 is cool but some of us have had problems with it:
http://forums.macresource.com/read/1/373...msg-373108
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What file format are the illustrations? That's the only important detail from the
point of view of an asset management application. Products oriented toward
photographers won't necessarily be able to handle vector file formats or CMYK
images or even pngs or gifs, for example, but they will handle jpegs, raws, tifs
and possibly psds. Are they illustrator files?
I wouldn't hold assume anything about Portfolio based on a bad exerience with
Suitcase.
Time for you to download demos, my dear, and perform some experiments.
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The illustration files are .EPS & AI Illustrator files. There are also JPEG versions of them as well. Time to go poking around the intarwebs.
Thanks y'all.
