Product Reviews

We were very impressed with iView Media Pro 2 when we reviewed it last year. The speed, price, and batch-processing abilities of this middleweight asset management application helped it win our top rating. It has an excellent Mac pedigree, but the big news with this new version is that it's now fully cross-platform compatible.

While this may not be relevant to a hard core of Mac purists, most users work in an environment that mixes computers running both Mac OS and Windows, and the ability to use the same asset management tool on both platforms, and by extension open catalogues created on one platform on the other, has the potential to give the sales of iView MediaPro 2.5 a real boost.

We should point out a couple of caveats to its 'fully cross-platform' claim, though. While we had no difficulties opening Mac-created catalogues on a Windows PC and vice versa, there are a few Mac-only features that PC users don't get. Unsurprisingly, they miss the ability to script the application using AppleScript, an omission that may seem unimportant, but whose significance becomes apparent when you realise the extent to which iView MediaPro can be scripted. There are a few handy sample AppleScripts supplied (Select all landscape or Select all portrait are particularly handy), but in conjunction with other AppleScript-aware applications such as InDesign, some very

ADVERTISEMENT

nifty scripts could be written to automate your workflow.

Despite occasional, unavoidable feature disparities such as this, the experience on Mac and Windows is commendably consistent, which is all to the good, given that, at its heart, iView MediaPro remains a solid performer.

Its core functionality - that of cataloguing media files for later searching or repurposing - hasn't been compromised with this update. Indeed, although the Mac version has hitherto led the way, the update to version 2.5 is more designed to bring the Mac version in line with its new Windows sibling.

Beside the cross-platform abilities, the most obvious change is an updated and rather fetching new interface. It's not just window dressing, though: it has been designed with care to help make the learning curve less steep, and it generally provides a consistently Mac-like experience.

Support for metadata has been stepped up again, with new support for Adobe XMP annotations. It goes even further, too, offering a plug-in for the Adobe Creative Suite that allows you to edit the four IPTC annotations not supported out of the box by Adobe - namely Status, Event, Location and People. Tags such as Author and Copyright can be set before images are imported from a digital camera, and although these are retained for subsequent imports, we'd have liked to have had the ability to store sets of tags in a drop-down menu rather than being tied to one set of information. As you'd expect, all annotations can be synchronised and exported, and there's now also support for basic XML export of catalogue contents.

Under Mac OS X 10.3, the PDF export and ability to view EPS files inline has been beefed up, and there's more support for professional digital camera formats. Moreover, catalogues can be distributed easily using the free catalogue viewer application.

This remains the best middleweight asset management application, and it is competitively priced.