iView Media Pro 3 (PC/Mac)

iView Media Pro 3 (PC/Mac)
Customer Review: Fast, reliable, and effective - but no online help
iView Media Pro is a digital assets management system, which allows you to organise, view, and track thousands of photographs in a wide variety of formats including Raw.

The application is fast, reliable and effective, and has an intelligent and useful license management system. But it does not handle network use as intelligently as it might, and there is, bizarrely, no online help, although the manuals are available for download.

We recently selected iView Media Pro after a five-way shoot out with Adobe LightRoom, Adobe Bridge, QPict, and Shoebox. Each of these offers a trial version, so it was a fairly simple matter to make a comparison. For the trial we ran a PowerBook 1.667 Ghz G4, and a Quad processor G5 — both Macintoshes.

Our conclusion was that iView was the fastest application over our 8,504 images, stored on a network file server. It was substantially faster than any of the other contenders, and easier to use than Shoebox or Bridge, while offering more reliability than Bridge. Adobe LightRoom, which is still in Beta, offers more advanced workflow features, but is generally slower and harder to get to grips with.

iView is at its best in cataloging. The keyword and IPTC based features are swift and extensive, and it can intelligently sort pictures into groups based on when they were shot. Although it stores all the data in its own database, it can re-inject as IPTC data into files that support it, or add as an XMP sidecar file, or, for those that support neither, add it into a Macintosh resource fork. This last is, of course, platform dependent. The ability to synchronise its data with the actual files effectively future proofs this application - if something better comes along later, you won’t have to input all your data in switching to it.

iView offers some rudimentary editing functions, but is mainly focussed on linking up to your main image editor. iView (the company) offers workflow guides for using Media Pro with Photoshop CS2 and with RawShooter, although you could also use it with proprietory software such as Nikon Capture, or high-end workflow software such as DxO.

There is a good range of features for exporting catalogs, either onto disc or to the web. iView offers a free catalog reader which you can distribute for Mac and Windows with your catalogs on disc or over a network.

All in all this is an excellent piece of software, and would get 5 stars if it were not for omission of an online help system. The makers may be trying to avoid this by putting helpful pointers on each screen, and these prompts are a great help when you reach the appropriate screen. However, if you are trying to find a feature that you have misplaced, they have little to offer.

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