Extensis Portfolio 7 for Win/Mac

Other products by Extensis Corp.

Product Features

• One-Click CD Publishing & Archiving.
• Optimized Features for Pro Photographers.
• Efficiently archive and organize your digital photos.
• Publish your work to the web - no HTML knowledge required.
• Support for more than two dozen Raw image formats.

Product Details

Product Manual [9.82mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 8.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002FHEQ6
• Item model number: FCE-18707
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 2, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,778 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

Product Description

Product Description
With Portfolio Client, creativity knows no bounds. Now you can quickly and easily organize, access and share your digital files with clients, workgroups and partners. Seamlessly integrates into the creative workflow with more intuitive and streamlined cataloging. Optimized for the needs of the creative user, including improved metadata import/export, image format conversion, and built-in CD creation. Streamlined workflow with Automated cataloging, archiving, and dynamic web publishing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Must be a programmer, January 22, 2006

By	Waleed Abu-Ghazaleh "tryingtomakesenseofit" (Al-Sharq, Kuwait Kuwait) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First the good news: Portfolio can catalog almost anything and is fairly fast (except with multiple field searches).

The bad: Despite my 15+ years in graphic applications, this is by far the most unintuitive, cumbersome and frustrating application I have come across. Simple procedures such as renaming cataloged thumbnails or changing file paths are nightmares and must be done MANUALLY. The whole package smells of one designed by programmers for programmers--even search fields always revert to blank whenever you change search criteria, forcing you to retype your search every time.

Worse of all is when I attempted to upgrade a large Portfolio v4 catalog to v7. This catalog has been in use by my agency for years and has over 10,000 records. After much frustration it was suggested I upgrade it via Portfolio v6 first. Hours later I was able to upgrade the catalog from v4 to v6 and then v7 only to find that I can't open any other catalog when the upgraded catalog is open. Which means every time I want to open ANY catalog I must first quit the application. Email support later suggested I "Recover Catalog" which took hours and proved futile.

Even importing field values is a nightmare as Portfolio insists on specific ASCII field separators, so that keyword thumbnail files imported from Getty Images for example must first be tweaked with a text editor to work properly.

I haven't upgraded to Portfolio 8 as I feel jibbed into bying v6 and v7.

25 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Endless headaches, January 26, 2005

By	W. Nettles "Will-N-LA" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've been trying to use Portfolio 7 for three months now to catalogue 3000 photos and create an online catalog. This product was recommended as the best application for what I wanted to do. I've used computers on a professional level for 12 years-I'm no greenhorn.
Portfolio 7 has been a continuous nightmare.
The manual is inadequate and incomplete. Tech Support was at first a 40 minute long distance hold and then friendly-but unhelpful-tech support. Then they wouldn't answer the phone at all. With e-mail support you'll get a get message acknowledging your query and then - nothing - Any useful tech support I received was from third parties.

Little and undocumented things like not clicking an obscure box buried deep in the menus would tie up my computer for hours busily creating catalogues that didn't exist or immediately crashed. Nothing about this was in the manual.
I worked with an experienced Network Engineer and even he couldn't over come the endless pitfalls. Hours and hours wasted.
One problem, I installed version 7.0.4 from the Extensis site purchased the CD from which we installed the server parts v7.0.0. They were completely incompatible. The read me documentation on the CD says that the CD contains version 1.2 . ???? And of course no where is there any indication that a minor version difference is a serious incompatibility problem.
At best this is beta software masquerading as usable. Its not. I'm stuck with it-I hope you won't be.

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, not for casual users, September 18, 2005

By	James Magdanz (Alaska) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Like PhotoShop, Porfolio is rich and deep. It rewards patient, attentive souls who study and learn. Portfolio 4 was a Godsend for me eight years ago. With it, I was able to efficiently organize thousands of images and produce a complex CD-ROM project. Since then I have used versions 5, 6, and now 7. All have been very useful.

Catalogs are a great feature of Portfolio. You can create multiple catalogs from the same database: one for this book, one for that report, one for this chapter, and another for that chapter. A single image can appear in one catalog or in many catalogs. You can drag an image out of a catalog and drop it in a report. All the while you have just one picture stored in one database. Not that long ago, for Windows users, there was nothing like Portfolio. Now Windows Explorer displays thumbnails, filmstrips, and EXIF data. Programs bundled with digital cameras, like Canon's Zoombrowser, are very easy to use, not to mention Google's Picassa. If one those is working for you, stay with it. However, if you have multiple publishing projects that require searching or scanning thousands of images, and if you use programs like Adobe InDesign to publish them, then you may find Porfolio indispensible.