Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Supported file formats: Nearly all major formats (more than 120)
Supported languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese Simplified,
Chinese Traditional, and Korean
Price level: Approx. $300
Address: Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, United States
www.microsoft.com
Extensis Portfolio
Vendor: Extensis
Purpose: Digital asset management software for professional use
Description
Extensis Portfolio is a well-established digital asset management package for ingesting
and retrieving images, sounds, movies, and documents. It offers a huge number of
options, and for that reason the learning curve imposed on the user is quite demanding.
However, it is very well documented, has one of the best user-written FAQs on the
Internet, and includes excellent training materials provided by the vendor.
Portfolio can catalog any digital file. When handling images, it extracts thumbnails, displays
screen previews, and extracts metadata from most formats. Its list of supported file
formats is formidable, and it can batch convert many imaging formats to JPEG and
PixelLive VFZ/PFZ, Celartem Technology’s compression format for scaling images
along edges to preserve detail (see www.celartem.com). For previewing, tagging, cataloging,
editing metadata, and Web publishing, Portfolio has a very full set of features.
Version 8 introduced the concept of scratchpad galleries: temporary baskets where you
can sort, edit, and merge files from searches of other galleries. This is the kind of feature
that continues to make Portfolio popular with newspapers and photo agencies.
Comments
A good archiving tool, Portfolio has some excellent features like auto-synchronization
of folders. However, it now faces stiff competition from Microsoft’s Expression Media
at the higher end of the DAM market.
Many users appreciate the Portfolio Express palette, a floating palette that makes the
contents of a catalog instantly available inside any application by offering a global keyboard
shortcut. With this feature you do not even have to open Portfolio itself: a timesaver
for busy workers.
Version: Portfolio 8.5 (2008)
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista; Mac OS X 10.4.9 – 10.5.1
RAM: 512MB (recommended)