Product Reviews

Portfolio is the favoured cross-platform digital asset management (DAM) application among designers, with good reason: it combines lightning-fast operation with a feature set that keeps expanding. This new version brings a redesigned, slicker interface and many processing enhancements - but the biggest news is NetPublish, an add-on that creates dynamic web pages directly from within the host application.

NetPublish is a live website delivery system and it's a huge advance on the static PortWeb technology that shipped with Portfolio 6: it relates websites directly to the Portfolio catalog that created them, combining great power with surprising ease of use.

The first step in the Wizard process is to select a template from the dozen on offer. Each offers a different solution to DAM publishing: some show thumbnails which, when double-clicked, link to downloadable large-scale previews; others allow users to select images to be stored in a cart for future purchase.

The next step is to customise the site. The site name, the main logo graphic, welcome page splashes and header/footer HTML files can all be specified here. You then configure the Results page, which may involve choosing a layout for displayed images, selecting which data fields will be displayed and which cascading style sheet is to be used, and so on. At this point, you can view the source as HTML, adjusting it by hand if necessary, and preview the Web page in a browser window. The final step is to publish the site, easily achieved by entering the IP address and clicking the Publish button. There are, of course, many more user-definable options at each point.

So far, it's pretty similar to the old PortWeb - except for the ease of use in creating the Web pages. But it's the live nature of the pages themselves that makes all the difference. Modify one of the images displayed in Photoshop, say, and when the relevant page is refreshed in the browser window the new image thumbnail and preview will be shown automatically - with no action required by the user. By specifying 'date' for the order of thumbnail display, you can guarantee that any recently added files appear at the top of the list; or you could give your images a ranking, to force favourites to display early on in the site navigation.

In order to use NetPublish publicly, you need additional licences from Extensis: a £150 licence grants access

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from up to five different IP addresses per hour, and £600 gets you unlimited access rights.

The main Portfolio application now sports a pop-out Folders drawer, which stores 'watched' folders - any item added to one of these folders is automatically added to the current catalog. Now, however, there's the option to rename files automatically as they're added to a watched folder or dragged from the Finder; the original item can also be either moved or copied to a new location on your hard disk, and the complete path can be turned into keywords. So, for instance, if you download images into a folder marked Technology within a folder marked Objects, both those names will become keywords.

Moving the Folders into a drawer frees up the left-hand side pane, which now contains the 'galleries' (custom sorts of a catalog), as well as three new buttons: 'All Items', 'Last Cataloged' (which finds the files most recently added) and 'Find Results', which stores the most recent find for instant retrieval.

An option when importing files is to create custom previews of any size, and to extract all EXIF metadata from image captures; this does, however, slow import performance. It's now also possible to embed custom metadata back into the original image, so that it can then be searched by, for example, Photoshop's Image Browser. Portfolio also now allows users to batch convert files from one format to another, allowing such variable parameters as JPEG compression level, pixel size, magnification and so on.

The ability to burn images, galleries, selections and entire catalogs straight to CD or DVD is new, and includes the additional option of allowing the thumbnail preview in the catalog to then reference the CD file, rather than the hard disk original - allowing you to free up disk space easily, without having to reimport image catalogs.

Drag and drop is fully supported, both internally and between other applications. Thumbnails can be dragged from Portfolio Express, the low-overhead floating palette that provides access from other applications, straight into your email client to send a file or directly into your page layout application; keywords can be dragged from any open document, such as a Word file, onto the thumbnail to which it applies.

As well as images, Portfolio can store sounds, movies, PDF and text files (which can be indexed on import) and more. You can choose whether double-clicking opens a preview within Portfolio or launches the file in the host application.

There are one or two glitches - the page up/page down keys are temperamental, and still tend to chop thumbnails in half. Dragging thumbnails to a custom order in a gallery is forgotten when the gallery is reopened and some older catalogs need to be 'recovered' in version 6 before they'll open. But overall, this is as worthy an upgrade as Extensis has ever produced, with a fresh new look and new features that launch Portfolio head and shoulders above the competition.