Iview is back...any one experiences with it (beta/ full version)

[fuego6]

Yes.. Mediapro is a disaster at this stage... not sure what PhaseOne did to mess it up so but so be it. They are supposedly working on it.. but at a snails pace. Their communication with customers via the forum reminds me a lot of Cerious and their disasterous Thumbsplus v8 rollout... another product that could have been so much more in the hands of real developers... oh well... I'll stick with Idimager even with its quirks because it works...

I've been a Media Pro user since it was a Mac only solution (indeed I worked with the original design team when I was at Apple). When it went to Microsoft my heart sank - but they didn't do too bad a job, just it stagnate for many years.

When I read that PhaseOne was taking over the software I thought that this would be great - finally someone would inject performance and features into the application.

Of course after paying the upgrade fee and installing I now see that things have gone from baddish to WORSE. The fee for upgrading delivers no new features other than a new skin - to make things worse though. the performance has REGRESSED SIGNIFICANTLY - there are few apps that handle 75k images well, but the older version of the app coped really well and felt fast, slick and smooth. The PhaseOne version feels about 4-5 times slower at rendering big images - I tested against the older version on the same machine, with the same settings - sure enough, browsing media files at full screen now creates ugly massively pixelated images and a 5-6 second wait while it pulls in a quality image. I've decided to ask for my money back - this is an truly appalling update.

 

[TomFid]

Some here evidently regard the new iteration of mediapro as a disaster. I've been using the newish v1.1 trial and haven't had problems. I haven't exercised it heavily, but I'm not noticing performance issues. CRWs render about as fast as before, and thumbnail browsing is smooth.

There is one significant development for people like me who want to move a big catalog to another platform (Lightroom). Mediapro will now write catalog metadata to .xmp sidecar files for file types for which it can't natively edit the EXIF info - old Canon 1Ds .tif raws, .SRW, etc. (Actually you can write sidecars for everything if you want). This means that you can easily get all the data out of your old catalog and into something new.

I'm about to try this on my approx. 100k image catalog (soon as I back up) and will report back how it goes. Next question: how to make best use of all the info in Lightroom, once it's in. The IPTC core fields are all easily accessible, but not really well-integrated into the workflow (at least to my limited knowledge). I have to say that I like having the tight library/develop integration in Lightroom, but MediaPro is still the better manager.

 

[Alpha Doug]

For those using Macs, in actual fact, Aperture is a great media and asset manager. In some ways, the way it manages them reminds me of iView in the old days. Very powerful, and will handle HUGE libraries, as well as let you create many libraries and switch between them almost instantaneously. It handles metadata smoothly, searches instantly, and the Smart Albums are a god send. For Windows users and Mac also, Adobe Lightroom is a pretty good asset manager. Does not handle video files or audio files though, and just kind of organizes a standard folder stack for you. But it does do effective metadata handling and searching, and it does handle very large Catalogues. But if you have a Mac, it's really worth trying Aperture as your asset manager. It only costs $79 in the Mac App store.
--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}

http://www.dougwigton.com/

 

[Alpha Doug]

PS. The image display and comparison tools in both Aperture and Lightroom make for quick and efficient culling of large photoshoots.

--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}

http://www.dougwigton.com/

 

[TomFid]

I did manage to export my 100,000 image catalog from MediaPro to Lightroom using the new xmp sidecar export to handle 1Ds raws and other files for which writing to exif was formerly not available. It seems to have worked just fine, though I've only spot-checked the results. The MediaPro sync of all the metadata out to the image files and sidecars was a lot faster than the import into Lightroom. Thumbnail browsing is also faster in MediaPro, at least the first time through.

Now I have all my IPTC core metadata attached to my images in Lightroom. I still haven't really figured out how to make best use of it, because Lightroom provides search for IPTC fields but doesn't really use them effectively for organization (e.g., hierarchical selection of the location fields).

MediaPro is on sale this week, 50% off, which makes upgrades a heck of a deal.
http://www.phaseone.com/en/Online-Store/Media-Pro.aspx
Use voucher DEC2011