Product Reviews

With the increasing proliferation of computer-based graphics, trying to keep the images on your system under control is becoming a major problem. The filename-based interface of Explorer simply isn't up to the task - hence the use of thumbnail-based visual image management programs. Extensis Portfolio has a long pedigree in this area on the Mac and is now determined to break into the PC market.

To manage your images with Portfolio you must first add them to a catalog. Thirty different image formats are supported through the use of ImageStream file translators. This is slightly disappointing when competing programs support up to 60, especially as some of the formats are very Mac-biased. The main PC bitmap formats - TIF, JPG, GIF, PNG - are all covered, but the vector formats are much less impressive. In particular, although support for CorelDraw! is listed, this doesn't include files produced with version 7, and files from earlier releases were handled erratically.

The process of adding images to a catalog is reasonably quick. Generating thumbnails for the 100 PhotoCD

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images on a Corel CD, for example, took just over four minutes and resulted in a 2Mb archive file. Once the central catalog has been created, the ability to select images through high-quality preview thumbnails, as opposed to searching through meaningless filenames on individual CDs, does make an enormous difference. Portfolio also lets you preview an image at full size before opening it for editing, while for supporting programs such as the latest PageMaker, it's also possible to drag and drop images into the open application.

Visual previews are certainly a big advance on filenames, but how do you find that image of a skyscraper or a balloon without trawling through the previews? This is where the database side of Portfolio comes into its own. By opening its properties dialog, each individual image can be given its own description, multiple keywords and even customised fields. A master list of keywords can be opened in its own palette and multiple keywords applied simultaneously to all selected images. The catalog can then be searched with the results to any query shown in separate windows.

The tools for turning a catalog into a visual database are certainly helpful, but producing a useful archive will always be a time-consuming chore. For professional photographers or image suppliers the drudgery might be worthwhile, especially for those intending to license the read-only version of Portfolio as a front-end CD-ROM browser. However, average users simply trying to get on top of their clip-art and scanned images will find the effort involved in creating and maintaining a useful catalog too much, and the ensuing benefits too little.