Software puts image management on a professional footing
By now, most Mac users should be fully involved in the digital revolution. If you are not editing home movies or composing digital music and then posting the results on your personal website, then at the very least you are downloading songs or storing photos on your Macs. Let's face it, the benefits of all this technology are too good to be ignored.
Alas, iPhoto is not perfect. Even though it now imports video and camera data, it was never designed for professional use. As such, it has a tendency to choke when asked to store 10,000 images or images that are not of a common consumer format.
Take my requirements, for example. I need my media management application to store and display not just photos but all of my illustrations, CAD drawings, 3D images, videos, page layouts, website designs, and PDF patent documents, to name a few. I need it to manage the products of everything I create in any application along with all the edited versions. Yes, I ask a lot.
My favourite photo and media application is iView Multimedia's Media Pro. It supports more than 120 different media file formats. Media Pro quickly opens a 200MB photo and in less than 10 minutes, it can catalogue and create thumbnails of a disk with 55,000 images on it. Its failings are that it does not import or even preview QuarkXPress documents, although it does import InDesign, PageMaker and even MultiAd Creator. It also will not open Vector Works CAD drawings or documents from Concepts Unlimited, the ultimate 3D design application. If you are a PowerCADD or 3D Studio user though, you are in luck.
Media Pro's other professional-calibre features will win you over, such as its ability to create image-rich webpages from your photos.