[Eug]

In our dept. we take a lot of pictures of small objects, perhaps 1000 objects per year for 3000 4 megapixel images. We use two Canon G2s with ring flashes. The pix are nothing spectacular, and are just for documentation purposes. However, our "management" system is very cumbersome.

What we do dump the pix from the cameras (say 30 objects at a time with 90 pix) into a temporary directory in Win XP, manually create a separate directory for each of those objects, throw all the pictures for each object into their appropriate directory manually, and then drag each directory into Cumulus. Thus, we can search by directory name. However, as you can guess, this is a complete pain in the @ss. Backup has also been a pain, using Windows Backup onto DVD-RAM discs (1X).

Now I'm thinking that if iPhoto 4 is stable and fast, I could just have the department buy a Mac, preferably a single 2.0 GHz G5 or something at the next refresh with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB drive, and SuperDrive. Or even a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac should it come out by spring.

Using a Mac we could just dump the pictures into iPhoto 4, create an album for each object, and then dump the pix into the appropriate albums. Backup would be a breeze in iPhoto 4 with a 4X SuperDrive. The only problem is that we'd have something like 1000 albums per year.

The date feature of iPhoto 4 would also help us out to a certain extent, because our main system has the date when the object was received. ie. If the object was received on Jan. 8, photos would be taken somewhere between Jan. 8 and Jan. 22.

Whaddya think?

One thing to note is that some of the people organizing the photos are very afraid of technology. Anything to make the process easier would help us a lot. Sure, within about 5 years or so, the iPhoto library might become quite bloated, but by then we'd have something more scalable in place hopefully. Hell, we could even Cumulus-ize things on the Mac side, over the main network, but right now we just don't have $20000 nor the space to build a centralized system for automated data entry, photo storage, serving with autoarchiving.

Or would you recommend something like iView?

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Hey that is exactly what we do at the Magazine I work at and 95% of the people that use iPhoto don't know how to use a Mac or even a PC that well and they get along with it just fine.

We get about 1000 really high images a month and even the current iPhoto handled it ok until it hit 8000, then it got slow so we burnt all the old stuff to CD's.

I would stick to iPhoto as it is really idiot proof as when you insert a card it even loads iPhoto and the import button flashes. I don't think iView will do that.

You sure as hell don't need a Dual PowerMac for this though, we do it on a Dual 1.25 G4 and it is way more then enough. By the looks of it the new iPhoto will even fly on a 733G4.

[Graymalkin]

For that sort of job I'm starting to like iView. It lets you build portable catalogs that reference absolute file locations. If you store all your pictures on a file server on the network anyone with an iView Catalog Reader (free) can view the media catalog and drag and drop pictures to other applications. Doing so lets you keep all your media files in one spot but lets you distribute the catalogs to anyone who needs it. The head end system that imports and manages the catalog does all the writing to the catalog while the catalog readers are read-only which keeps people from borking up your original files.

I also like the cataloging options. You can add tons of metadata to all the files in the catalog which makes it easy to find what you're looking for even out of a large database. It's also got a pretty decent AppleScript library so it wouldn't be too difficult to script an easier interface to allow the average dumber to add files to the catalog.

With the Pro version you can merge catalogs and do some kung fu with the file's Finder attributes. It will also make contact sheets, thumbnails, HTML galleries and text based tables. I'm pretty jazzed about iView because it handles so many file types and has some really nice catagorization options. I think for professional work iView Media is going to suit your needs a bit better than iPhoto. The purpose of iPhoto is to organize picture collections for mom and pa, not provide an office with a media catalog.

[Eug]

Thx for the comments, but I should probably make a couple of things to clarify why I'm considering iPhoto.

1) I have to "manage" the system. If iPhoto actually worked, it save me frustration. Our IT department in the institution is overworked and won't manage any photo management system for our department. They have enough problems with our Windows network I guess.
2) All of the objects are already catalogued with keywords, etc. in a completely different software program. However, that system is built without images in mind, and it's pretty cryptic to use anyway.
3) iPhoto IS built for ma and pa, so maybe many here is willing to learn how to use it. Cumulus freaks everyone out here. My initial impression from the website for iView was that it was somewhere in between Cumulus and iPhoto for complexity.
4) Our entire network and EVERY other computer in the network is a PC. I can't view the iView website because it seems to be down, but it doesn't help us much for scalability if it's only scalable on Macs.

One of the reasons I started playing around with Cumulus is because of all the scalability and keywords, creation of catalogues etc., but it turns out to be such a waste of time to duplicate everything. ie. Do our searches in the other filing system, and then just look for the pictures by object number in Cumulus.

As for catalogues for end users, that isn't really an issue either. So far we just go by object number and burn that directory to a disc. We don't distribute the pix for more than about 5 or 6 objects at a time, so all that means is that we have most 30 photos at a time being used - not hard to browse even if they're all in the same directory. And with iPhoto you can create an HTML page for browsing that easily.

I'm just wondering it this is really feasible in iPhoto 4 (which I haven't seen yet).

If so maybe I'll start getting the quotes together for an iMac 20" with SuperDrive, as a solution for the next 3 years.

----

BTW, iPhoto isn't dual optimized is it? I'm thinking is what it needs is lots of memory with fast bandwidth to be real Snappy�. That's why I mentioned the G5. But I'm also thinking a G4 iMac with 1 GB RAM would suffice, and I wouldn't have to get a separate monitor - we're short on desk space.

Too bad the iMac G5 doesn't exist yet. We're due for an update though. The last real refresh (besides the 20") of the iMac is last Feb. Perhaps they'll announce the iMac G5 on Jan. 27 as the 20th anniversary iMac.

EDIT:

Because of this thread, I started an iMac G5 1.6 20" prediction thread.

[Eug]

Is 25000 photos a hard limit or just a limit where things get really bogged down?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Eug:
Is 25000 photos a hard limit or just a limit where things get really bogged down?

I am sure they mean hard limit. The old iPhotos also had one that was a little lower.

Just burn CD's or DVD's of the old junk anyway. When you insert a iPhoto burnt disk it launches iPhoto and shows all the albums, it is really neat.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
I am sure they mean hard limit. The old iPhotos also had one that was a little lower.

Just burn CD's or DVD's of the old junk anyway. When you insert a iPhoto burnt disk it launches iPhoto and shows all the albums, it is really neat.

I don't think it's a hard limit. I remember seeing a screenshot of iphoto with 25000+ images but I can't remember where. So I'm not really a good reference at the moment.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by Eug:
In our dept. we take a lot of pictures of small objects, perhaps 1000 objects per year for 3000 4 megapixel images. We use two Canon G2s with ring flashes. The pix are nothing spectacular, and are just for documentation purposes. However, our "management" system is very cumbersome.

What we do dump the pix from the cameras (say 30 objects at a time with 90 pix) into a temporary directory in Win XP, manually create a separate directory for each of those objects, throw all the pictures for each object into their appropriate directory manually, and then drag each directory into Cumulus. Thus, we can search by directory name. However, as you can guess, this is a complete pain in the @ss. Backup has also been a pain, using Windows Backup onto DVD-RAM discs (1X).

Now I'm thinking that if iPhoto 4 is stable and fast, I could just have the department buy a Mac, preferably a single 2.0 GHz G5 or something at the next refresh with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB drive, and SuperDrive. Or even a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac should it come out by spring.

Using a Mac we could just dump the pictures into iPhoto 4, create an album for each object, and then dump the pix into the appropriate albums. Backup would be a breeze in iPhoto 4 with a 4X SuperDrive. The only problem is that we'd have something like 1000 albums per year.

The date feature of iPhoto 4 would also help us out to a certain extent, because our main system has the date when the object was received. ie. If the object was received on Jan. 8, photos would be taken somewhere between Jan. 8 and Jan. 22.

Whaddya think?

One thing to note is that some of the people organizing the photos are very afraid of technology. Anything to make the process easier would help us a lot. Sure, within about 5 years or so, the iPhoto library might become quite bloated, but by then we'd have something more scalable in place hopefully. Hell, we could even Cumulus-ize things on the Mac side, over the main network, but right now we just don't have $20000 nor the space to build a centralized system for automated data entry, photo storage, serving with autoarchiving.

Or would you recommend something like iView?

iView and Canto Cumulus and the like are professional digital asset management systems, that cost like $200 or less. They probably have more worthwhile business functionality (and probably also run on peecees).

I'm sure iPhoto will work -- but whether it will justify a dual G5 I can't say

[dtriska]

Originally posted by Eug:
Is 25000 photos a hard limit or just a limit where things get really bogged down?

Steve had slightly over 25 000 photos during the keynote, so it's not a hard limit.

[SAgent0068]

And if you go iPhoto, you can add myPhoto to the mix (sorry for the plug, but see my sig) to make the photos easily accessible to others in your organization who might not be able to take advantage of iPhoto's new Rendevouz sharing features

[Graymalkin]

You can run iView Media and the catalog reader on both Macs and PCs. That's part of the reason I suggested it.

[Eug]

Hmmm... I still can't test iView, because the site is still down.

However, I did some more digging, and it seems that iPhoto is still gonna be fairly useless for this purpose, and even just for me at home.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand the info correctly, there STILL is no way of creating sub-albums. ie. iPhoto doesn't allow you to organize your albums into directories.

It's fine if you have 30 albums. But it's gonna be pretty irritating dealing with 1000 albums. We would need 1000 albums in a certain year, even if that only means 3000 pictures.

eg. Say I had 1000 objects to manage with 3 pix each, and each object is labelled with numbers between 1 and 1000. I'd create a new album for each object, and each album would hold 3 pictures.

Then I'd group the objects from 1-100, 101-200, 201-300, etc. At the year I'd have only 10 albums, each with 100 subalbums. And then I'd take those ten and put them under the category "2004".

Later, to get something labelled "Object 584", I'd go to 2004 -> 500-599 -> 584.

This is impossible in iPhoto (and thus you'd have a bazillion albums in the left colum), but I gather it would be possible in iView. Cumulus I simply don't like because the interface seems very kludgy. You can even just create directories to do this, but it's a pain, and not as easily searchable or as easy to manage or backup.

-----

Some iView questions:

Does iView work well enough with Image Capture that photos are automatically downloaded to iView?

Does iView manage the pictures itself?

Do you find it cumbersome to create a directory tree in iView? (Like I said, I don't like the interface in Cumulus that much.)

How do you find backups?

If iPhoto supported subalbums, it would be perfect.

BTW, I'm not sure we'd ever use the freely-distributed catalogue reader. When we do searches, all we want is 1-5 object. So at most 30 photos or so. It's pretty easy to sort thru 30 photos without a cataloguer.

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Just label the film rolls, that way you don't have to deal with albums.

[Eug]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
Just label the film rolls, that way you don't have to deal with albums.

That won't work either, since each roll will have different groups of stuff in it, each of which will need it's own album.

Anyways, I've just been playing with Cumulus (again) and with iView.

Cumulus is just as complex as on the PC (as expected), and iView is only a little better. More importantly, AFAIK neither actually manage the files on disk, so I still would have to organize the directories on disk manually. These apps just link to the the files and directories. What a pain in the @ss.

WTF? iPhoto refuses to have album subfolders, and the pro apps refuse to have anything to do with true file management.

I guess I'll take a look at Photo Album 2.0 and see what it offers.

[Nebagakid]

Go for it.. If your photos mean A LOT to you, you could get an XRaid and a Fibre Channel Card to connect the XRaid to your G5... Keep your data fast and safe!

[Eug]

Originally posted by Nebagakid:
Go for it.. If your photos mean A LOT to you, you could get an XRaid and a Fibre Channel Card to connect the XRaid to your G5... Keep your data fast and safe!

XRaid???

[Eug]

Installed Adobe Photo Album on my PC. It pales in comparison to iPhoto.

And it doesn't copy files into itself either. iPhoto is the only one that does it.

[TheIceMan]

Eug: My comment has more to do with the quality of the thumbnails displayed on iView Media Pro vs. iPhoto. I've done this several times now and iView Media wins every time.

Launch both and compare the clarity of the thumbnails displayed by iView next to iPhoto. It's really evident, especially when the thumbnails are small. iPhoto's thumbnails are atrocious. They look grainy, almost fake.

So my vote is for iView Media, solely based upon the quality of thumbnails displayed.

[Eug]

The iPhoto thumbnails are not great, but at least they're usable. It's not a big deal for us.

Anyways, I've been playing with an *cough* evaluation *cough* version of iPhoto 4, until my iLife disc arrives from Apple.

It's MUCH improved over the previous versions, esp. with speed, but I have confirmed the features I need are missing.

1) No subcategories within albums.
2) The keywords cannot be sorted.

So I can't make 1000 albums without cluttering up the left sidebar, and I can't make 1000 keywords because there is no way to sort them.

The Smart Album sorting feature is VERY useful however.

Maybe iPhoto 5 will get sortable keywords and categorizable albums, but too bad I can't upgrade to an iMac with iPhoto 4 right now.

[digital_dreamer]

Have you tried Portfolio from Extensis? It can be rather simple, if you just need the basics. Or, it can be pretty powerful, if and when you need the extra features.

It also offers a �Folder View," that can keep the catalog in sync w/directory when items are added/removed.

I�ve cataloged a total of over 600,000 items for my clip-art and photo library.

regards,
MAJ

[Eug]

Thanks. I just installed it and demo'd it.

I like the fact that it manages it's own directory with copied pictures, but it seems to be setup so that it's like a souped up Finder, controlling directory trees.

I'm not too enamoured with the search function though. It doesn't seem to consistently find the names in the directories (unless I add keywords to the images), and in some ways Cumulus/iView is more powerful (but neither directly manage the directories).

iPhoto is oooohhhh so close, but yet so far.

I think I may just have to stick with a PC and Cumulus for now... until iPhoto 5 comes out.

[Troll]

Just a thought:

Could you not use iPhoto Library Manager to solve your problem? You could decide on any sort pattern you like, but perhaps using each letter of the alphabet and then only as many albums as you have objects. You'd put iPLM in your dock and remove iPhoto. Users would launch iPLM and see an index of all of the letters of the alphabet. They'd then choose T for example, click the launch iPhoto button and see a list of albums with "Telephone" being one album. iPhoto launches pretty quickly in this configuration. If they then wanted to see a pic of an envelope, they'd go back to iPLM and click on the E library followed by the Relaunch iPhoto button. You could probably even do an Applescript that does this.

[dmoore]

I don't understand the comment that iView doesn't allow you to do file management. That's its primary purpose! You can trash photos, copy or move photos, and create new folders directly from the main thumbnail interface.

Maybe the poster's problem is that he's still using an Apple mouse. Note: the right mouse button is your friend; its the key to unlocking the power of practically any power app.