Hi - just wanted to drop a note and let you know that I have added 2 new reviews to my Digital Asset Management website: www.DAMRoundup.com - IMatch and Photo Mechanic.
For those that may not be familiar with the site, I review DAM software is very great detail providing lots of screenshots and program usage from a photographers perspective. I do lots of research on the software before the review and tend to use the larger packages for at least 30 days before writing the complete summary. By using the software, I gain an understanding of it's good and bad points which I discuss in each review. Also, I am typically in contact with users and even the developers themselves to ensure what I write is as accurate as can be.
Please stop by and let me know what you think... I am always looking for feedback as well!
Thx - Andy.
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www.DAMRoundup.com - DAM reviews, news and more!
Hi there.. you know - I hadn't actually heard of those 2 products! Thank you for pointing them out to me!! I'd love to take a peek at them and do reviews on them - I am downloading them now and will begin to use them to see how they do in my tests.
Stay tuned.. I"ll post back as soon as I'm done with the reviews. Thx!
Funny I was just about to post a question on this forum about different software packages for maintaining images.
Here's what I believe I need:
1) Handle RAW
2) Tag Raw / JPG
3) Can Geo-tag with appropriate stream
4) Face Detection
5) Content tagging (coupled with face detection), ie, give me all photos of JASON
6) Easily migrated between drives.
I'm going to read through your reviews- thanks for posting it.
Andy, thanks for the post and the reviews. They don't seem like a month's work but I know that a lot of learning goes into preparing for them.
Henrik, that can be done in Imatch if you import the necessary EXIF data into categories and process those categories. It is not a trivial process but after I got the data I then grouped it so that I had roughly one-stop aperture groupings (e.g. f/8 to less than f/11). Once you see the real data you'll find there are too many decimal places and far too many possible values for what is to all intents and purposes a single aperture such as f/8 (Would you have thought to look for f/8.1 or f/7.9 as well as f/8 ?). I was too slow-witted to do it with a BASIC script but that would be the better way to go.
Having got the appropriate category or selection you can display the corresponding images sorted in many different ways no matter where they are physically stored.
One thing I want is a script that will calculate the ratio of lens focal length to shutter speed and group it into categories so that I can more easily assess my hand-holding stability and then infer when a lens is not performing as well as it ought to. Another one that would help is having aperture grouped into say one-stop counts from whatever the lens maximum aperture is. That's the beauty of having a sophisticated database at your disposal - so many things are possible once the data is available. Getting the data can be a nightmare.
Something about Imatch that was not clear in the review is that the categorization is very flexible. The same keyword can be used as different categories so e.g. "tree" can be a category under "flora" and also under "fauna.location". The category list can be extended or rearranged or otherwise altered on the fly and need not be totally thought out and built and set in concrete before any images are imported. The only real downside to the categories is that certain characters such as full stops are not allowable. That makes having "f/8" acceptable as a category under "aperture" but "f/2.8" is not acceptable.
