Product Reviews

Now that Extensis has divested itself of its plug-in arm, the company is free to concentrate on its core applications. As such, it has upgraded its popular asset management program, Portfolio, with a range of tweaks and enhancements that make its operation faster, better and smoother.

Cataloguing files is now noticeably faster, and background cataloguing can take place while you work elsewhere. There's enhanced support for more file formats, including both thumbnails and full-screen previews of QuarkXPress files, while Camera Raw import now recognises when an image has been captured in portrait mode, and automatically rotates it to fit the camera's orientation.

Portfolio now remembers manual sorting of images within galleries between sessions (a feature that was broken in the previous release). Furthermore, it remembers individual sorts for each user within a workgroup. New Scratchpad galleries form temporary holding spaces for organising files from multiple sources, and support printing and web publishing. A tabbed Properties palette shows EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata at a glance, as well as keywords and general file information. In addition, Portfolio can now read metadata such as frame rate and duration directly from movie files.

Portfolio differs from image browsers such as iPhoto and Adobe Bridge in that it catalogues offline media, enabling you to keep your assets on removable disks. By displaying screen previews rather than the original files, the search and display process is much faster, even for huge numbers of images. The downside of this approach is that you can't zoom into images or smoothly rescale their thumbnails, as Portfolio only references the original files when you open them. This means that if

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all your thumbnails have been catalogued at, say, 112 pixels square, changing the browser view to show 256 pixel thumbnails (the largest size possible in Portfolio) will have no effect.

Portfolio Server, the multi-user version, adds a range of workgroup solutions. A set of presets for FolderSync now lets you determine how and when assets are added to Portfolio catalogues, and users can specify certain file types to be ignored in the process. Individual users can create private galleries - subset collections of the main catalogues - that are visible only to them; they can also create public read-only galleries that are locked to prevent changes. In addition, you can now publish galleries directly to websites using NetPublish, rather than having to publish the entire catalogue. A new logging system provides tracking of statistics for sites powered by NetPublish.

Automatic synchronisation can now apply keywords and metadata based on properties set for particular folders. When you drop images or files into a specified folder, Portfolio automatically keywords the items with the appropriate metadata.

While a lot of wrinkles have been ironed out, there are still some irritating habits. The worst of all is to do with thumbnail display. If the array of thumbnails in a Portfolio window doesn't fit the window size exactly, then some thumbnails will be only half visible at the bottom of the window. Fair enough, but where hitting the page down key should show the next batch with those thumbnails displayed complete at the top, it instead shows the bottom half of the images at the top of the window. In extreme cases, this means you can either see the image but not its title, or the title but not the image. It's really time this problem was addressed.

Portfolio 8 has a new browser-based online help system that gives comprehensive assistance - if you can access it. On a 'small minority of Macs' (our test Mac included), opening help displays a Macromedia Flash security warning. The Extensis website provides information on how to get round this for Windows users only.

Portfolio 8 is a slick upgrade that manages vast numbers of files with ease. Our test catalogue of more than 26,000 items was quick to browse, error free and has never crashed. A few wrinkles still remain, though, and need to be dealt with.