News and Reviews > Image Manager Shootout

Where is Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0??

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david.intp:
I prefer another product not included in the Image Manager Shootout.  IMatch 3, available at www.photools.com, is very powerful and reasonably priced.

nudone:
iMatch looks quite nice. it would be candidate to include in the next image management shootout but that's not planned any time soon.

i'll give imatch a few days test drive and see if i'm inspired to write more. thanks for pointing it out, david.intp.

moerl:
I've known about iMatch for years, it seems. I just dumped it as a possible option because I believe it used to be rather expensive for one.. and secondly its target audience used to be much less the broad range of photographers of all sorts of skill levels that it is today... they used to target photo pro's and advanced amateurs and companies specifically. Now it seems they've changed the philosophy around a bit and are offering a much more accessible tool for just about anybody interested in digital photo management. I do remember loving it when I tried it, but couldn't justify the price at the time. I'm willing to say that iMatch may be good enough to blow both APE and ACDSee out of the water in terms of image management capability. The reason I say this is because iMatch has been focused on image management specifically, for YEARS. ACDSee has always been more of an all-in-one type deal, with image browsing, editing and some organizing thrown in for good measure, and Photoshop Album is for noobs, more or less. Not only that, but it ALSO is more of an all-in-one type application, except that the organization component is very strong and everything else is not all that great from what I could tell. I also remember reading extremely good reviews of iMatch back at the time when I tried it.

Do post impressions of iMatch if you try it. I'd be HIGHLY interested. I may try it out myself if I get to it this week.

EDIT:
Overall, I must say I like APE's way of dealing with image management more than ACDSee overall so far. It's much more intuitive and I never had any trouble finding all my catalogued images in APE while with ACDSee, I had to post about the problem before I figured out the image well was what I was looking for.. also, in APE any image can easily be excluded from the catalogue by simply selecting it and hitting the delete key on your keyboard, or via right-click context menu, and leaving the "Delete file from disk as well as from catalogue" (or similar) option UNCHECKED in the delete dialogue that pops up. It's that simple! And in ACDSee I'm supposed to deal with filters and be limited to only being able to exclude whole folders from the image catalogue? Also, APE's interface is far prettier to look at and has some very sexy features ACDSee can not call its own. One of those is image stacking. In APE, you can stack images that are very similar, (like burst-shot images for example, or other very similar images), on top of each other, which is represented in APE by a thumbnail that has visible layers below it to signify a stacked little collection. The top image will have a showing thumbnail, the ones below will not be visible, but the stack can quickly be stacked and unstacked via the context menu. Another sweet thing about APE is how it deals with categories/tags. You can create multiple categories and then you have the option to either create a SUBCATEGORY or a TAG in an existing category. It makes far more sense than ACDSee's universal naming of tags as "categories". As I said before in this thread, you don't want to call a person, for example, a category. Rather, you want to have that be a tag, which is much more intuitive and logical than ACDSee's way of handling this problem. Also, each tag, after having been assigned to at least one photo, in APE, actually gets its OWN THUMBNAIL. Now THAT is cool. On the right in the organization panel, when you are looking at tags, you will actually see small thumbnails ON each tag, the source images for which seem to be selected more or less randomly. I suppose the tag just gets thumbnailed with the FIRST image that was tagged with that tag.

Little things like that are what make me think APE better than ACDSee at this point.

nudone:
i've already uninstalled it. i haven't the patience to figure it out at the moment, which isn't really fair on the software but i just couldn't use it straight after install so it had to go.

if a review of pro graphics file managers comes around then imatch will definitely be part of the shootout.

Carol Haynes:
One thing I will say for iMatch is that the author is quick to respond to questions by email. I tried it a while back but somehow never felt comfortable with it and so didn't feel I could justify the price. If a discount could be negotiated I might give it another look. I had problems getting the software to read EXIF information in my digital photos (other software didn't seem to have any problem).

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