Customer Reviews

iView MediaPro 3 (Win/Mac) [Old Version]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I ordered the box version from Amazon, instead of the download from the manufacturer not only because it was less expensive, but the main reason was so that I would have a paper manual. So many programs don't come with hard copy manuals and I prefer them over on-line help.

As for the program itself, I trialed a download first. For me, the thing I fell in love with was the ability to call up multiple images, side by side, and compare them! It makes selecting the best image a breeze - a HUGE timesaver. You also have the ability to swiftly zoom in to check focus at full rez. Another wonderful thing is that putting the curser over one of the preview images, and sliding it, will slide all the open previews simultaneously, so you don't have to individually zoom and move each image. You can do this with up to 6 images at a time! You can also do a quick histogram check by hitting the "h" key, which makes it easy to toss off bad exposures at the same time as the review. While you've got the previews open you can hover the mouse over them and hit any # key to color-code the image. The colors can be keyed to whatever description you want. I do "1=green" for yes, "2=yellow" for maybe, and "3=red" for no. There's room for quite a few more colors after that. I then hit the sort key back in the main screen and quickly select all the red "no" images and delete them. After I have all my green "yes" images, I then review them 6 at a time to give them star ratings. I resort by rating and now all the best images are at the top of the page and I can start processing them.

You can batch process file name, and some other things that I don't bother with, as well. It's got some nice keywording ability and you can easily sync the keywords with your Photoshop files. What's incredibly nice is that you can click on any word in the keyword list and all the images you own, with those keywords, are immediately shown in thumbnails! Finding an image is actually fun! It will even give you thumbnails of images you don't even store on your hard drive anymore!

Fantastic program - I highly recommend it! The only reason I didn't 5 star it is b/c it's not all that intuitive. This is a read-the-manual kind of program, but you can do an awful lot with it without having to get too far in the book. ;)

I'm a longtime Mac user and for re-naming and archiving and cataloguing thousands of images iView Media Pro is the best, I really like the feature that let's you produce and publish on-line galleries of your images, without any code or html experience, using only a very simpe interface and you're ready to go.

For the full-time photographer or amateur, I highly recomend it.

iView is a quick study. It does take some time to build a catalog, mostly because it generates or imports thumbnails of each image. Once that's done, you can view and catagorize the images with amazing speed. The "light table" function is especially helpful, since you can look at up to six images side-by-side in full-screen mode, zooming and panning all simultaneously or independently, it's your choice. The light table feature could use a right-click menu so that you could see a list of your pictures and, while still in light table mode, switch out pictures. As it is, you can only use the arrow keys to go to the next (or previous) photo. The slide show module does have such a menu. In slide show, however, you can't zoom or pan. A major strength of the slide show is the ability to play audio annotations. When you consider that iView handles .pdf documents and many common movie formats, a slide show with your audio annotations for each file makes for a very powerful presentation tool. To top it off, iView offers a free reader, so others can view your slide show (or catalog) without having to buy iView Media Pro. To top it all off, iView catalogs can be shared by network users. All-in-all, a very useful program.

Now, forget the name iView. Microsoft bought iView in 2006 and is rebranding it as Microsoft Expression Media. It will be part of a broader Microsoft Expression Studio of digital creation and editing programs. In Q2, 2007, the name iView will be dropped. It is available online (under both names) for $199. For that price, you get a free upgrade to Microsoft Expression Media when it is released, and the option to buy the whole Studio at a discount. Make sure your source makes the same upgrade offer.

It's going to be an interesting year in this field, as Adobe has a competing project, Lightroom, in the works, and there is also Extensis Portfolio. I'd check them all out to see which best suits you.

As for me, iView is the best fit.

The concept of this software is very good. If you are using raw files or DNG files it works fine. A major flaw in my opinion is that it will not import large JPEG or Tiff files into its Library.It crashes. For me this makes the software useless. I am not able to use this in my workflow until the problem is fixed. So right now the program goes unused.

Steve H

iView MediaPro is the favorite media organizer I have used. Better than Adobe Lightroom or iPhoto. It has a very "user friendly" interface and the ability to update folders automatically is terrific. But, it was recently purchased by Microsoft, and I just hope they don't "Microsoft" it too much.

I downloaded the demo of this program and although I am by no means a pro photographer I do have over 4,000 digital photographs of my family and I am taking new photos each day. In addition I post my photos on Pbase so family and friends can always see the latest photos. I started looking into Digital Asset Management after I started to fall behind on updates of the Pbase photo website because of the time consuming process of managing my collection. In case you have not looked, there are products out there such as Idimager, Imatch, Extensis Porfolio, and many more. I downloaded demos of Imatch and Iview Media Pro and used each only briefly. Although Imatch costs only $49.00 or so and Iview costs about 3x more (around $160) I chose Iview because I felt the interface was just easier to use. Of course this says nothing about the features in each product and I am not attempting a feature by feature comparison because I don't have the time. I do think that Imatch is an excellent product and the few features I am looking for appeared to be available in both products. I recommend that anyone looking to purchase software attempt to download a demo first.

In a professional environment, I have close to 20 licences of iView Media Pro3, I have one of Microsoft Expression Media, but I don't recommend the microsoft product, it's overpriced and they don't do much with it, they should spin it off.
Buy your licences on eBay for about $30 when available. MANY good features, small footprint, catalog sets, free readers, and this is big, you can save a catalog to send to other iView users, including the free reader version, this catalog can contain tons of info including sequencing and grouping, try doing that with Aperture or Lightroom. I have Aperture and I do use it, but it is a dog compared to iView.

I purchased iView MediaPro 3 from Amazon and found the first shipment had been opened, and probably used..I called to report this and Amazon said to return it.
I sent it back to find the next shipment to be also previously opened.
I finally gave up and just used the software anyway.
I does Not work in Intel based Macs.
It does work on my old G4.

Finally a product that solves my Digital Asset Photo management needs. I have tried three previous products w/o luck until this one.

This was a great product until MS bought the company and started writing code for it. Now it crashes and freezes up. Finally i took it off of my computer as it messed that up. I switched to Adobe Lightroom.