a million monkeys typing

Photo Organisation Hell

Posted October 12th, 2004 at 12:46pm

A few months ago, just after our first-born had arrived, our old Kodak DC-280 was starting to falter and occasionally shutting off or losing power for no apparent reason. The Kodak –now literally held together with duct tape– had served us well, producing some 18,000 pictures over the 4+ years that we had had it, but now we needed something new, something reliable, to document our son’s childhood. I spent a few weeks sussing out the alternatives, and was thinking about getting an Olympus C-5xxx model, but I really wanted something I could upgrade with better lenses and standard photographic equipment. Alas, there was nothing around like that in my price range. At the last moment, however, I managed to swing an excellent deal on a Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) thanks to a personal favour someone owed me. For less than the cost of the Olympus, I now had a great camera with full manual controls and the ability to use my EOS lenses, filters, and other gear. The 6.3 megapixel resolution was nothing to sneeze at, either. But recently, we’ve been running into some frustrating problems. And they all have to do with organisation.

The camera is still perfect, and suits my needs to a tee, but finding a way to store the many large images we’ve been taking is becoming somewhat problematic. Since our main computer is a 733MHz G4 PowerMac with OS X 10.3, it seemed natural to use iPhoto. At first it was great… it allowed us to store images, burn them, share them between accounts, categorise them, etc., and even my wife could use it without any problems. But after the first thousand images of our newborn, it really began to slow down. Scrolling was almost painful with our favourite thumbnail sizes, the beachball would be forever spinning, iTunes would stutter, the occasional file would be corrupted, and our CPU usage went through the roof. Plus, the anal-retentive techie that I am, I was sorely conflicted between iPhoto’s ease of use (especially for my wife) and my need to organise photos into hierarchical directories.

Graphic Converter leaped out to me as a possible alternative. After all, it’s packed with hundreds of features, has a handy little “toolbox” for basic image manipulation, reads most different formats with ease, and it allows browsing through directories, thumbnails and other views. Somehow, though, it still seems like an image viewing application instead of a photo manager. For example, while I can edit the IPTC metadata in GC, I can’t see any obvious way of searching it. Also, the lack of “virtual folders” for collecting and sorting material (think the “albums” in iPhoto) is a definite drawback.

Meanwhile, the Canon ImageBrowser software that came with the camera has an OS 9 feel, the interface is rather clunky, and the capabilities are quite primitive. Photoshop Elements 2.0, which also came with it, is mainly a pared-down version of Photoshop and doesn’t allow much past the “browse” photos functionality. Photoshop 7.0 CS may be the ne plus ultra of photo editing, but the built-in file browser is slow, bloated, and doesn’t offer things like virtual folders. Plus, who wants to run the full Photoshop behemoth just to browse and categorise photographs?

A friend of mine that used to own a small graphic design company, and who has since sold several of his machines, mentioned to me that he had a spare license for Extensis Portfolio that I could use. Now, after a bit of asking around, it turns out that most of my designer friends are using Portfolio, so I figured that I had nothing to lose by giving it a try. I installed the software and started corralling the few hundred loose graphics I had kicking around my hard drive. I started exploring the interface, skimmed through the manuals, and viewed the good introductory tutorials at the Extensis website.

By way of comparison, iPhoto is to Portfolio what iMovie is to Final Cut Pro. The i-apps are certainly easy to use, have some great features for home use, and work well with other i-apps. But if you push them too far, either you’ll be ripping your hair out in frustration or things will begin to fall apart. In short, they are for typical consumer –and not professional– use. I wouldn’t want my wife to use Portfolio. It’s not that I doubt she has the intelligence to make effective use of it (after all, she is smarter than I), but she doesn’t have the patience or time –especially right now– to master any sort of technical application. And Portfolio has a definite learning curve, compared to iPhoto.

In the few days I’ve been using it, Portfolio does seem to have a few flaws: it occasionally quits for no reason; sometimes it doesn’t know how to create thumbnails from some of my JPEGs; there is no quick (or obvious?) way of doing small edits like cropping, flipping, or adjusting levels or colour; it relies on other programs to download images from my camera; and the “syncing” of folders to library can be a bit cumbersome.

These minor quibbles aside, Portfolio is probably the most powerful photo management software I’ve ever used. So far, with about a thousand images, it’s quite speedy, and I love the rather large pop-up previews of files. The metadata is easy to enter and to search. The program acts almost transparently with the OS, so I can drag’n'drop items directly onto dock icons to edit them. It not only synchronises with the file system, but it also has virtual folders (even based on search results), so it has the best of both worlds. It allows disk-based catalogue archiving, which is a necessity for managing hundreds of gigabytes of files. The print options are quite flexible and handy. The views (i.e., how the images and metadata are displayed) are highly customisable, and you can created your own named views. There also seems to be some decent server and webpage functionality built-in, but I haven’t bothered venturing into this territory yet.

Mind you, it doesn’t have some of the more user-friendly aspects of iPhoto. For example, you can’t do simple retouches or send images to your desktop background, but I never actually used these anyway (I retouch only in Photoshop or the GIMP), so I’m not missing much.

I’m going to continue using Portfolio for the next few weeks to see if this will be the ideal photo management system for me. Heaven knows, the price of $300 Cdn is not worth throwing away on anything less than a perfect application.

My wife, meanwhile, will continue using iPhoto, albeit with much fewer images. Time has proven that it’s certainly worth its price tag, as long as its limitations don’t become too overwhelming.

Any recommendations for other Mac-based photo management software? Drop a comment below or feel free to email me.