Thursday, April 12, 2012

Media Pro 1 - initial testing

Imported 34,810 photos taking up 272 gigs of space on an external hard drive, resulting in a catalog slightly larger than 1.8 gigs.
Total time of import ~ 6-8 hours

Initial import produced about 2 dozen images logged as "Unable to scan" (see note and graphic below) but was able to rebuild by hand. I have read other reviewers who claim they were unable to rebuild by hand.

User Interface:

Reminds me of why I liked Expression Media 2 (except in black). Straightforward, simple and intuitive.

Out of box, very little customization before import.

Left hand is devoted to either the Organization Panel or the Media Information panel -- both customizable.

Org Panel very nice and full of robust features, providing far more sorting tools than Bridge: Credit, Author, Doc title, Copyright, Place finder (Country), in addition to the standard keywords (of course), date Finder,

Media Info panel -- use of colors to visually separate categories of information is a cool idea and makes it easy to scan the panel. Annotations (what Bridge calls "Metadata) is reminiscent of EM2 as well.

OK, the bad news:

1. Single most obvious issue is the "Unable to scan media file" error message. This can be resolved by going back and selecting the unscanned files -- listed in the activity log at least -- and then going to the Action menu and then Rebuild Item (Command + B). This may not always work, however, and I had to retry it several times with a few of the unscanned files.



2. Maximum catalog size is unclear -- at what point do the problems begin? Media Pro tech support claims "128,000" files but we don't have a clear idea of the aggregate size of those files. They might add up to 20 gigabytes or 120.

Next up, a series of search tests to see how the program fares under the gun.

Stay tuned!