Rangefinder Magazine
November 2004

First Exposure by Larry Brownstein
Extensis Portfolio 7

As businesspeople we are all concerned about getting the most out of our financial assets. Some of us even have financial managers and many of us have accountants, too. But what about the assets we worked the hardest to create—our images? Are we getting the most out of them?

Extensis has released Portfolio 7, the latest update of its digital asset management software. Portfolio was developed to help photographers manage their image library in such a way that the right image is found easily without wasted time. Because today’s digital photographers have so many files from digital cameras and scanned film that digital asset management is a timely concept. The idea sounds great, but I must admit I was skeptical of adding yet another piece of software to my workflow. On the other hand, I was already in need of help managing my expanding archive of digital files. I wanted to find out: Is this a tool of benefit to the working digital photographer? Or, is it a complex program that is more effort than it is worth?

Adobe has seen the need for image management. In the last few versions of Photoshop, Adobe has provided a visual Image Browser to allow users to conveniently find files.

Beyond Photoshop’s simple visual browser, many Mac OS X users are using iPhoto, which is packaged with OS X. iPhoto provides a simple and convenient image browser and is also used for digital slide shows. iPhoto also provides a search capability—it allows you to assign keywords to images and to search for images by keyword. Apple should be congratulated for including it as part of OS X.

However, many professional photographers will outgrow iPhoto’s capabilities. They need easy keyword management, want access to the “metadata” that digital cameras create, want to burn CDs with content and a browser included, etc. Portfolio provides these capabilities and more.

Portfolio’s most basic functionality is as an image browser. And, fortunately, this capability is available with next to no effort—all that is required is that images are imported into a “catalog.” Importing can be done with a simple drag and drop of a folder containing the images.

Let’s say you just photographed a wedding and have a thousand images to edit. First dump the data onto your hard drive. Then create a Portfolio catalog. Then drag and drop the files, importing them into Portfolio. Portfolio will provide an excellent browsing environment for the images. It will also allow you to edit the original file (e.g. in Photoshop) and even delete the original image from Portfolio.

I have been a “digital photographer” for many years now and have accumulated quite a collection of CDs filled with archived images as well hard drives filled with more recent projects. Add to this my recent acquisition of a digital camera (all the other images were originally film-based) and it seemed like time to figure out how to make sense of all this image data in a way that I could access and retrieve the desired image files easily. Is Portfolio the answer?

My first experience with Portfolio provided a pleasant surprise. The digicam I use does not include previews. So, when I dump the images to my hard drive I get a bunch of non-descriptive, numerically sequential names for each file and no visual information. Without Portfolio I have no recourse except to open every single image to find the good ones. Alternatively, I could apply a Photoshop action, such as saving each file in a folder to a new file (this causes Photoshop to include a preview icon) and deleting the original file. This is better but who wants to write the action and remember how to run it? I’d rather not.

Once I bring the images into a Portfolio catalog, Portfolio creates the image previews and I have a much easier time editing the images. This alone is a huge time saver. And Portfolio is smart enough to do so with a wide range of image formats.

Even if your digicam allows you to save image previews, you may wish to turn off this option, saving precious memory card space, and let Portfolio take care of the previews. With Portfolio you no longer need to consider creating the preview in the camera.

After my pleasant experience with editing pictures from my digicam, I decided to see how useful Portfoio would be to manage my archive of images. I have thousands of images archived on CDs. Some of them are Kodak Photo CDs, some of them are images I scanned on my desktop scanner, and some are completed digital projects that were archived on CD.

The problem I have is that this data is stored on about 50 CDs. When I need an image file I have to go manually flipping through all my discs. The Kodak Photo CDs, fortunately, have image icons printed and I have arranged these so I can see them through the jewel case. Unfortunately, only 40 out of a hundred scans are visible on one page so I need to open the jewel case to do a complete search.

Making the problem even more complicated, the CDs that I created myself have no visual index. I have to rely on a listing of file names that I put inside the jewel case.

So I sometimes spend 15 minutes scavenging around for an image. Sometimes I never find the image I am looking for though I know it is there somewhere. So I began to explore how Portfolio could improve upon this mess. Here is a step-by-step example of using Portfolio to catalog my archived CDs.

Step 1) Mount a CD in the drive.

Step 2) Select groups of similar images.
I select all the images of the same subject such as The Great Circus Parade festival. This allows me to assign the same description and the same keywords to the entire group of images. After these images are cataloged, the same process is applied to the remaining images on the disc until they are all cataloged.

Figure 1

Step 3) Import to a Catalog.

Drag the selected images onto the Portfolio browser window. This tells Portfolio that you want these images to be cataloged. Portfolio will bring up the Cataloging Options form (as seen in Figure 1). This step is critical as this is where Portfolio will receive the information that will later be used to retrieve the desired images when needed. Keyword selection is the name of the game. You will need to think about your goals. Do you intend to be the only one using the Portfolio catalog? If so, then a cursory set of obvious keywords will suffice. Do you intend to eventually publish the catalogs on your web site with a keyword searchable user interface? If so, you will want to do an exhaustive set of keywords. The most successful stock photo web sites include a surprising array of keywords that include even such things as the predominant color of an image. You can even search for concepts. I went to www.gettyimages.com and did a search for “summer and red and happiness” and the search found 41 images. Most of these images showed young women or girls wearing red. But if you cataloged them with only an obvious keyword, such as “woman,” your customer may not have found the image in numerous less obvious ways.

Step 4) Edit the Keywords.
I discovered a good shortcut for keywording. For The Great Circus Parade my keywords included some keywords that would apply to every picture, such as “Milwaukee.” I also included some keywords that would apply to most, but not all, of the pictures, such as “clown.” By doing this I just have to delete the keyword “clown” from a handful of images, rather than having to add it to many images.

After doing the group import, I proceeded to modify the keywords for each image by manually selecting each image then deleting some keywords and adding others that applied just to certain images. Use the Item > Edit Keywords command.

	Figure 2

Step 5) Orient the pictures properly.

In this example the archive CD was a Kodak Photo CD. Slides were scanned automatically and some of them were not oriented correctly. The Item > Rotate 90 command (Figure 2) was used to re-orient the catalog image. (Note: If this were a writable file, I would also have the option of rotating the original file, not just the catalog image.)

I cataloged several CDs this way and then began to explore Portfolio’s search and sorting abilities.

Figure 3

Portfolio has numerous ways of displaying the images: with preview sizes ranging from small to large and with options to display no, little or complete sets of the metadata. By metadata I mean not only keywords, but also information about file creation, type, date, location and information that accompanies digital camera files (f-stop, aperture, exposure time, metering mode, etc.). Figure 3 shows a Portfolio browser configured to display a large amount of the metadata along with small preview. In another mode a single image is shown at a time with all the metadata—potentially dozens of fields of information. At the other extreme, the metadata can be hidden, leaving maximum room for the images.

Figure 4 shows all the fields that Portfolio will sort by. Notice there are many fields related to camera settings. I think many photographers will use this information to improve their technique. They can determine why certain images are successful by perusing the metadata. Perhaps by looking at exposure time a photographer will realize he needs to shoot at higher shutter speeds to prevent camera shake. Or maybe he will notice that a particular metering mode will tend to work better in a particular lighting situation.

	Figure 4

To search for images, use the Find command in the tool palette. Searching by keyword is likely to be the most useful type of search, but searching on other metadata information such as file names, file types etc. are also possible.

Besides cataloging my archive CDs and cataloging images from my digicam, I foresee Portfolio being useful to me in several other ways:

• Assist me in the editing process for a photography book I am working on
The Great Circus Parade and the Burning Man festival are among several dozen festivals and parades around the country I have photographed that are destined to be in a book. I think Portfolio will be a good way to edit and browse all the photos and a good way for me to send the photos to solicit feedback from people.

• Assist in preparing photos for stock photo agents
Portfolio can be used to edit the images from a shoot and to write the selects to a disc with a browser packaged on the disc.

Extensis has another package that allows you to publish a Portfolio catalog to the web with a search engine. It is called Netpublish. I want to learn about that package and explore turning my web site into a storefront rather than a gallery.

Portfolio has other great capabilities. The following is a list of marketing initiatives I have heard of photographers doing. I had previously considered these myself but never had an idea of how to do so before exploring Portfolio.

• A Photographer’s Portfolio on a disc: For a while there was a trend for photographers to send discs of their images to prospective clients. This portfolio-on-a-disc had the advantages of having the space to hold many images and being less expensive to send to clients than traditional portfolios.

Portfolio allows you to create a digital portfolio easily and to package it with a image browser—a stripped-down version of Portfolio for those who don’t have the application on their system—so the recipient can easily view the portfolio.

• Disc sales: Almost 10 years ago PhotoDisc pioneered the sale of collections of images around a theme on a CD. They became wildly popular with graphic artists who could now have collections of images for the price they used to pay for single images from a traditional stock agency.

Actually, the portfolio mentioned above and the image collections are similar tasks. The main difference is file resolution. A portfolio only requires enough data to look good on a screen. An image collection must supply files at high enough resolutions for typical print usage. Portfolio supports both of these needs.

I have found Portfolio quite robust and easy to learn. I was able to use the software right out of the box and only needed the reference manual on several occasions. There were no crashes. Only once did I feel it was missing a capability: When opening the original file for editing (in the Preferences the program can be configured to launch an image editor by double-clicking rather than using the menu command), there was no place to select which editor to launch, so Portfolio uses the default editor.

There are other makers of digital asset management software that you may want to evaluate. Canto makes Cumulus 6. Find out more at www.canto.com. Iview Multimedia makes iView Media 2.5 and iView Media Pro 2.5. See more at iView-multimedia.com.

So, is Portfolio 7 a friend or foe? Think of organizing your desk and office. If you only had three paper files, you probably wouldn’t need a hanging file set-up and a nice four-drawer filing cabinet. But if you had hundreds of files, it pays to put in the effort to make nice readable tabs, alphabetize them, place them in a conveniently located file cabinet and even to clean them out every now and then. It is much the same with organizing digital files—if there are only a handful of files then a folder on your computer is good enough; if there are lots of them then you can use all the help you can get—that’s where this well-thought-out software comes in.

For more information, visit Extensis’ web site: www.extensis.com/.

Larry Brownstein is author and photographer of Los Angeles: Where Anything is Possible, an inspirational look at life, culture and architecture in L.A. He is represented by Getty Images, California Stock and other photo agencies. His work includes travel, landscape, portraiture and wedding photography. His web site is www.larrybrownstein.com. He can be reached at larryb@larrybrownstein.com or 310-815-1402.