I was pretty unipressed with the 7 trial (among other things very slow with a 4000 image portfolio). In fact I started using the iView Media trial and was very impressed. My upgrade may be a different program rather than 7.
I too was unimpressed with the 7 trial. I didn’t find the implementation of the Website feature very impressive, and I had a number of crashes on 3 different Macs before giving up and returning to 6. These is also one new "feature" that makes it impossible to save Galleries with a specific image order. I’m sticking with Portfolio 6 for now. I’m hoping there will be a major update/fix very soon, I like the program and was looking forward to a major upgrade. I would hate to have to switch to something new.
I am still evaluating v7 against Cumulus v6, mostly the 2 web publishing approaches. I own them both but have never been fully satisfied with either app. Either is better than any of the other choices though for more than 20k images.
I found info in the manual that portfolio will NOT embed keywords in .psd documents .
Bad , but I could batch process files into layered .tiffs , so there was some hope .
Unfortunately Portfolio 7 seems very buggy on all of this area , on random basis it is embeding metadata , but only on eapprox half of the selected files .( it doesn´t promt about not beeing able to do so )
On one hand I have succes in embeding keywords even into some layered 16B ZIP compressed files , but some times even simple not compressed tif document will not be enriched with assigned keywords . this seems to work randomly .
Another problem is during cataloging , even if i make a setting – NOT TO extract file path to keywords ( initial dialog box is opening ) , it is still writing file path as a keywords , which is PIA .
FWIW, I finally bought an asset management app and after trying demos went for iView MediaPro 2.5. Workflow just seemed to be a bit more intuitive.
Jim
Jim-
Have you loaded 8,000 or more images into it yet? If so, how is the speed and stability? I do intend to download and run a trial myself, but I would appreciate hearing your observations also.
I see that iView has a crossgrade discount of about US$30 for Photoshop, Cumulus or Portfolio owners. Nice.
Jim is right, it looks like IvMp may be the best of the genre. I am still testing it but it may replace Cumulus for me. Certainly it does the basic essential functions very well and very intuitively.
My organization, Answers in Genesis <www.AnswersInGenesis.org>, just purchased Portfolio Server 6 plus a service agreement that gave us a free upgrade to Server 7. I administrate our catalogs, the server, and will perfect the NetPublish pages in the coming months. I have been pleased with the latest version. While it is slower than Photoshop, Portfolio’s batch image conversion works great to convert our PSDs to TIFFs or JPEGs and fit within specifications. I am disappointed it doesn’t offer LZW compression for TIFFs, but JPEG compression quality is adjustable. Color profiles are not embedded.
I like the redesign of the interface.
There are several bug fixes and improvements with which I have been pleased. Such as Collect command now includes Windows and Mac viewers and Portfolio crashes less often when cataloging PSDs.
There are still many bugs to fix and improvements to be made. I’m working on a list detailing each of these things. Below are some of my findings in the week I’ve been using Server 7.
You cannot set a watched folder to Server Autosync if the folder is on a volume local to the server.
Still no way to copy field and keyword data from one record to the other. QuickFind does not search the entire catalog unless extra clicks are made to select "All Items" or the root folder. One would usually have to double-tap Enter to search the whole catalog.
Clicking a folder in the folder view takes longer because Portfolio now displays the folder’s contents and subcontents.
You can no longer edit text field data by removing it. Portfolio 6 would move the text into the entry field if you deleted a text field entry.
Long text field entries cannot be fully seen.
If someone renames an original file through Portfolio on a different computer, but you have that record visible in your screen, the file name refreshes, but if you attempt to rename the file, Portfolio shows the first file name in the name dialog and returns an error if you attempt to change the file name.
We are most looking forward to implementing NetPublish for our few thousand images we are currently cataloging.
I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you may have.
I only hope Adobe beefs up the Browser to become a cataloging program that works, portfolio 7 continues to be a bloated slow buggy mess as are all of the cataloging programs available.
..psb support is not working in some features of P7.
Regarding: "…bloated slow buggy mess as are all of the cataloging programs available." Have you tried IvMp? And although I have my issues with Portfolio and with Cumulus I would characterize neither as a "bloated slow buggy mess."
