Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network?

February 16, 2008 11:46 AM

Suggestions for Photo Management Software Shared Over a Network?

I'm in the exact same situation as the person who asked this question on the topic, more than a year ago.

To summarize: "I need to find networked photo management software, similar in function to Picasa or ACDSee, but with the ability to share "tags" between multiple users over a network. The products I've been able to find all allow tagging, but those tags are available only to that user, and my company needs to search the photo tags without each user having tagged each photo individually."

Is iView still the way to go? It seems likely but I must say I am hesitant to adopt it since it was recently acquired by Microsoft. There's something called Portfolio Server but it is out of our price range.

Do programs like Aperture, Bridge, Lightroom, etc., allow you to edit metadata "within" the photo files, so that if a group of people keeps their photos on a shared drive, those photos will indeed begin to collaboratively accumulate tags and other sorting information?

posted by macinchik to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: iView is now Microsoft Expression but they haven't functionally altered the program at all in the year since that last thread. Whether that's for the better or for the worse is debatable. At the very least, I don't think the Mac development is getting the short shrift since MS took over, since it seems to still be the same team doing the programming.

We're now managing about 20,000 photos with users keywording as we go. We generally only have one user accessing the catalog file at a time, though--now that I think about it, I don't know how well it plays with a TRUE multi-user environment where many people would be tagging or editing in a single catalog file all at once. We just have somebody tag a bunch of shots to describe their content, then someone else might access the catalog from their own computer to copy out the photos they want for a project (and they would then tag them to say what they're being used for). Works just fine in that regard.

Aperture and Lightroom were not even considered as an option for us as they require too much processing power. iView/Expression will happily run on our crummy PCs that are a couple of years old. While I haven't actively been searching for a newer app, I haven't heard of anybody touting anything newer as being better.
posted by bcwinters at 12:35 PM on February 16, 2008