Photography Management – IMatch

A few months ago I realized that I need a heavy duty tool to keep track of my photographs. I did a lot of research and finally came up with IMatch.

Here’s why…

A few months ago I realized that I need a heavy duty tool to keep track of my photographs. I did a lot of research and finally came up with IMatch.

I’m not going to go through all the research here. I found an informative list of tools and reviews in the forums over at DPReview and using google turned up a few other compendium pages that were helpful.

Here’s an interesting article.

PhotoByte is interesting but it didn’t solve the problem of off-line storage and seemed to be out of development.

Picasa is a photo management tool by Google. But Picasa is for a person with personal pictures, not a photo business.

I finally listed my photo management requirements as the following:

  1. Manage a very large number of photos. I have 9000 slides that I’ve taken since 1977. But there are over 10,000 pictures from the D70 since summer 2004. This is a serious image management problem.
  2. Manage off-line storage. Photos are backed up to DVD and each days photos are in folders named yyyy_mm_dd. There are sometimes 300 or more photos in a single day. Especially for a shoot with more than one model.
  3. Thumbnails and other information available for off-line pictures.
  4. Keyword assignment and searching. And a large tree of keywords built in that I can enhance as I go.
  5. Ability to rotate the thumbnails for offline storage to see the picture.
  6. Some editing capability for the images, although photoshop will be the editing platform of choice.
  7. Ability to process and edit EXIF data.
  8. Ability to handle a variety of formats, although JPEG is my format of choice. Certainly RAW may become important.
  9. High performance.
  10. Ease of backing up the database.
  11. Under continuing development and with a good support system with forums and folks that are listening to their clients.
  12. Have a long trial period so that I can kick the tires before I buy.
  13. Cost less than $100.

IMatch satisfies all my requirements. It costs $60. And it has a 30 day trial period, after which it preserves all your database. It handles my off-line storage requriements easily. I have some 20 DVDs of photos and while it takes about 50 minutes to scan a DVD full of photos and put then into the database, once they are there, keywords and categories can be easily added; thumbnails can be righted and I can find what I need.

A super tool. I highly recommend it.

See discussions in the photography forum.