From Wikispaces - LoneLibrarian

This note was too good not to pass along to the readers here. LoneImageLibrarian has done her homework and it's worth sharing.

"I've been playing with Lion OS, as well as full versions of Portfolio, Filemaker Pro 11, and the old Bridge standby recently and had some interesting details to report. Lion OS has more bugs to it than I originally noticed; we'll call it blindly wanting to see the best in something even when it isn't there. Snow Leopard is continuing to be used office wide to avoid some hiccups with our printer-from-the-future, so that is a hurdle for later down the line. While Lion is not necessarily the savior we all hoped for, there are other options on the purchased horizons. Filemaker Pro 11 sounded like such a good idea in the literature, but what doesn't? The Photo Catalog section comes with templates for getting database level organization underway, which look excellent and pretty. In practice, however, the no-manual new-user experience of this supposedly beginner level appropriate feature is not user friendly in the slightest. I am no green kid when it comes to computers and tend to find my feet just from using a program. The overall response of the office to Filemaker Pro 11, even outside of our digital images needs, has necessitated the purchase of The Missing Manual book on Filemaker Pro 11 to move ahead in just testing it out.

"Portfolio is proving to be a nice image-tagging and organization option, though one has to categorize the correct metadata to embed as IPTC to have it searchable both within Portfolio as well as Spotlight. For budget purposes, however, Bridge still encompasses the full package of features. Portfolio 8 for the individual experience has a pleasant user interface and is rather pretty and oddly tactile, but the expense is certainly off-putting. For those who are not intimidated by many-paned, institutionalized programs, Bridge is thus far still the best cost-effective image cataloging software. More news to come from the front as more images are processed."

Lots of food for thought and all worth digesting. Stay tuned sports fans!

Image cataloging software: the browser approach

There are few low-cost database digital asset management systems available today, and with the growing trend toward cloud computing and storage that number is likely to decrease in the years to come.  Extensis Portfolio 8.5 (standalone), Adobe Lightroom 3, Apple Aperture 3 and Phase One EM2 are the only serious reasonably-priced DAM options available. But even those programs can become costly when you starting adding up the licensing fees for multiple users.

If you need to organize your organizations image collection and can't afford an enterprise-level digital asset management system  or  a catalog-based (i.e., database) program your best bet is a browser-driven program.

Perhaps the best known browser program is Adobe Bridge CS4 that ships with nearly all Adobe image editing and suite programs. Easy to set up and easy to use, Bridge is in some ways a more sophisticated "Finder" (for the Mac).

A stand-alone program, Bridge also possesses a very robust set of organizational tools. In fact, my browser of choice for the Johnson & Wales University image library is Bridge CS4.  But Bridge is not, as we discussed in a previous entry, a cataloging program, and as a result has several important drawbacks, particularly non-accessibility offline and the need to continually update the local cache.

Bridge is ideal  primarily for its ease of use, ubiquitous nature and of course cost (free). But it is, really, only a stopgap method for any large image collection. If you're using Bridge (like we are) you must start planning for the next phase in managing your image library. Given the nature of software Bridge will eventually reach its breaking point -- you need to be prepared for that eventuality.

Next: catalog or database software for image archiving.