Hi Moe,
that's the best thing about IMatch, and the reason why so many 'normal' users and professionals trust it:
IMatch is an "Open System" and has been developed with this as a major goal. It not only has the best feature set on the market but also allows you to
import and export your data in many ways.
IMatch does not keep the meta data you enter or associate with your images in a secret store, with no change to get it out of the system if you decide to switch to another system some day.
Numerous export formats, and the built-in scripting language allows you to export your data in various ways, from text to XML to Access or SQL.
Many users switch to IMatch these days because they want to get rid of their current monolithic systems or image browsers because their image collection grows each week, and these systems fail to handle databases with more than 10,000 or 50,000 images. If you use a digital camera you know how fast you get another 1000 images ;-)
The ability to import data from existing systems into IMatch is very important for these users. Currently IMatch supports import from:
ACDSee
Thumbs+
Portfolio
ImageAXS
PhotoRecall
Other formats via text import or custom scripts
More than that, the ability to
export information from an image management system is even more important. IMatch uses XML as it's native storage format, and allows you to export your meta data (attributes, properties like title, descriptions, categroy assignments, keywords and the like) in various formats.
This is a Big+, and has been built into the system from the beginning.
Even more, IMatch has top-notch support for IPTC information - the standard for adding annotations directly into your images. This long run standard allows you to keep your comments and other meta data within your images, so you can switch to another system at any time.
IMatch maps the IPTC information contained in your images automatically to the IMatch property database, and allows you to access this and other meta data from all relevant modules in IMatch.
As recent times have shown, even big companies may drop out of business (ImageAXS) or decide to discontinue a product.
In case of ImageAXS, all users where stuck with their old systems, because the meta data was stored in an Access database.
So, while having all your meta data in a standard database product (Access) you still have the problem to be able to IMPORT this data into another image management system. Most image management systems I know of are totally unflexible in handling data from other systems.
Here is where IMatch jumps in!
Since each ImageAXS or Portfolio or PhotoRecall user has a custom database, depending on his/her needs, you need some flexible handling for input data in your new system.
Using the IMatch scripting language I was able to provide import scripts for these systems which only need a minimum of customisation (like telling IMatch which "field" of the old database system should be mapped, what it contains.
IMatch even convers the old-fashioned "keywords" of these databases into the fully dynamic categories concept only available in IMatch.
Having such great import features, and the ability to export your data at any time, and the IPTC handling makes IMatch a very good product for users concerned about what may be the "standard" in ten or twenty years from now...
I personally use IMatch to archive my huge TIFF (> 100,000) image collection.
I'm sure that I will have access to my images (due to using TIFF and not some proprietary RAW format for long-term storage) and my meta data (because of IMatch) ten or more years from now.
If you want more information, or an discussion with hundreds of IMatch users, check out the IMatch user forum at Yahoo:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/imatchuserforum/
--
Mario Westphal
Author of IMatch - The Digital Image Management Solution
[email protected]
http://www.photools.com 