Hi Pedro,
I'd be interested to know what you have compared Fotostation to?
Have you tried IView?, IMatch, IDImager?...
Fotostation Classic costs over 500$ and when you need offline
storage server you need to buy another Index Manager software
several hundred bucks. Is that basically right? Sounds expensive to
me!
I heard once they have a non-standard way of storing metadata. Do
you have open access to your metadata to migrate to another
application or are you rather stuck with Fotostation forever?
Does it have hierarchical keyword trees? does it support XMP? Can
you script it? How is support? Since Fotoware is selling to
companies rather than single photographers, I guess they are not
responsive?
Sorry for the many questions, I'm just curious because I rarely
hear anybody recommending Fotostation.
--
Matteo Del Grosso
http://www.delgrosso.de
Hello, Matteo, no problem at all, that's why we have discussion boards, to discuss and change opinions
I compared FS with iMatch, if you can call it a comparison at all. At the time, hands down, iMatch was nothing compared to FotoStation. You may require the image server after a while, but that isn't something you need to get yourself going. It just helps you with performing better searches as well as handling way lot more images.
There is nothing non-standard in FS that I know of, except for one thing: EXIF information (which is ONE of the 255 IPTC fields any given file can have) is not handled very well, and can be "lost" when you dupllicate an image. The exif information is stored in a different field, but the copied file will no longer contain it. I work around this by doing most of the color adjustments in NC4.4 before converting to JPG where I apply the rest of the modifications.
IPTC text is the industry standard for storing text with images (for ANY kind of document, that is) and to my knowledge, the only standard that is platform independent. Because text about the image is stored IN the image, any application can read that text back again later. This is true for me. Whenever I apply text from FotoStation, that text is extrapolated in things such as Coppermine gallery viewer, any of your thumbnail viewers etc. I hear XMP is coming stronger and stronger. FS does not support XMP at the moment, but they're stating that they will soon as well as "solving" the exif problem (yup, they admit it).
Here's the "standard issue" text editor of FS. ANY text can be stored as a text template in a whiff and accessible via the templates menu:
The way I see it, the higher price of FS against any other app, is directly related to how fast and easy you can set up texting of your images.
Searches are also powerful, but for the full power of searching (i.e. in ranges of values) you'll need to buy Index Manager too. I don't really find it expensive. CS2 suite cost over one thousand dollars where I live. Index manager itself does not work with any other applications than fotoware's own though, so you can't use index manager with any other application that I know of.
Remember also that FotoStation is an industry grade application. It's not fancy, no bells or whistles, just down to the bone "this is what you need" type of functionallity. It does so well, and it is not jumpy of a few hundred thousand images. What truly convinced me to buy this application to begin with, was a friend of mine that showed me how he worked with a little over half a million images in FS. As painless and effortlessly as if he was working with 2-3 images.
BUT, there are shortcomings. You need an Image Editor (CS), and you also WANT a RAW converter. FotoStation is neither of these. It's an image librarian only, but at that, in my view, the best. As I said originally, adding text to images is one of the things FotoStation really excels at
Their target audience is not the photographer market though, it's designed for newspaper editors and such that have little time to find that one perfect image for their articles, that may explain the rather high price.
--
The sixth sick shiek's sixth sheep's sick
--
Stuff about me at:
http://www.digitaldias.com 
