Picture Cataloguer

wildviper

Hi,

Wonder if you can help. I have searched for an answer here and no luck.

I have thousands of pictures sorted in different folders. I want to take them off of my hard drive and back them up on DVDs. However, I want to be able to have a list or somehow have the ability to pull up a XYZ.jpg from DVD #11 pretty fast for example.

Is there such a program that is affordable and can catalogue my backups for easy retreival???? Currently I have backups on DVD, but I have no idea what files are on that and what they look like. I have to actually open it up in WinXP and go through each folder.

I know I will have atleast 15 DVDs. That is why this is a concern for me.

Thanx.

gluwater

Check this page out The Dam Book
iView seems to be a popluar choice but it is expensive.

Rhuarc

gluwater wrote:

Check this page out The Dam Book
iView seems to be a popluar choice but it is expensive.

I currently use IdImager, there are three versions, Lite, Personal, and Pro. The lite version has actually been released for free, and it would probably do what you need. Here's a link if you want to check it out:

http://www.idimager.com/

claudermilk

The DAM Book is a good start, as is the website.

I use IMatch--since you're on XP it will work for you. At a little over 70k images I'm one of the lower-mid-sized databases I know of running that app. It handles off-line storage quite well.

Only 15 DVDs? amateur.... BTW, I no longer trust DVD's for image storage--I'm sure I've posted here on the topic & have been engaged in some....enthusiastic...debates over on FM regarding DVD vs HD for archiving.

Angelo

Photo Mechanic is a powerful tool.

wildviper

Thank you all. I am checking out IdImager and Match Image softwares. So far I prefer Match Image since it seems to work more efficiently for me than the IDImager.

In IdI, it seems I have to click twice to do the same thing that I can do by clicking once in MI software. For example, if you want to see a picture of "brown" and "dog"...in MI, I just check the two boxes and it displays right away. That is 2 clicks.

The same in IdI is a little bit more convulted...I have to click on "search" then choose the two categories...then press "ok". Finally, it seems I have to click "show" to actually show.

That is 5 clicks to 2. Perhaps I haven't got IdI configured to the way I want it, but I didn't have to configure MI software. Anyways..I will search a way to see if this can be solved. Anyone have any idea?

Oh, and there is no "Wizard" to help you in IdI???? Seems confusing to me.

Still my decision is not final yet. Will update this thread.

wildviper

Well, just an update...i am preferring IDimager now more and more. In fact, I haven;t used iMatch after I learnt my way around IDimager. It has a lot of features that are/can be very helpful in my workflow.

For example:
-It has a photo importer that imports files from various different sources including your camera/card reader or network drive.

This photo importer is amazing. It alone can save you tons of time in cataloguing work. While importing, it has features such as "Mirror copy" to another location for extra security. It also has a feature where we quickly tag them for categories and those would be created and also written to XMP files.

In addition..you can run a script that you can create or get from somewhere...I am planning on running a web script that will automatically create images for web from my Jpegs.

Oh, it also imports my NEF Files together with the Jpegs. Also tags the NEFs as original images.

Very good software. I would happily pay the money twice over.