image management program

[Harry Harrison]

41 minutes ago, Starsphinx said:

Someone once said about camerabits its nice to have a small dedicated developer who produces clean fast software

Yes, I've only ever heard good things about them and they seem to be taking their time to perfect this new cataloguing function (quite a few years I think) so I hope that it comes to fruition.

Edited January 11, 2020 by Harry Harrison

[Bill Brooks]

22 hours ago, MDM said:

 

Bill - what are you comparing Bridge to? Have you ever used Lightroom?

 

I used to use Bridge from the time it was released with PSCS2 but switched to Lightroom in 2012. There is no comparison between them in terms of searching in my experience - Lightroom is orders of magnitude faster. Furthermore, Bridge would frequently lose the thumbnail cache as well and I would have to generate all the thumbnails and let it index the metadata which would take ages. I have never had to do anything like that with Lightroom - it is far more stable and robust in my experience. Aside from alphabetising the keywords (not something that concerns me), I can't see any advantage of Bridge over Lightroom.  I think Bridge is a useful program for certain things (great file browswer) but not as a data manager for any even moderately large image collection.

 

I am not blind to Lightroom's charms. It is a great program. As part of my Adobe photo subscription I have a up to date copy of Lightroom Classic on my boot drive. I watch the Lightroom videos and fire it up yearly for educational purposes.

 

However for my exclusively stock photo workflow I know that Bridge for selecting keepers, Adobe Camera Raw for preliminary processing of keepers, Bridge for processed RAW renumbering and keywording, back to ACR to output a TIFF from the keyworded processed RAW to be then finished in Photoshop, Photoshop action to output a Alamy JPG from the finished keyworded TIFF. All works for me

 

I then save the processed RAW and the final TIFF masterfile to my Photo Archive that is on an external Thunderbolt Drive.

 

I believe that the keywording in Bridge is more robust than Lightroom and being able to order your supertags to the top of the heap instead of alphabetical makes the supertag selection in AIM go much faster.

 

As to speed.

 

With the exception of the Photo Archive drive, all applications are contained, and work is processed, on a 1 TB SSD memory boot drive in a desktop iMac with 32 gig of RAM. When the finished files are moved to the Thunderbolt Archive drive, then their duplicates and Bridge cache are deleted from the SSD drive.

 

File compression is turned off, thumbnails are medium size embedded in the file, the cache for the SSD is non existent once you delete the SSD images. I am running Bridge on a powerful computer in 2020 so I do not experience any of the problems with slowness you experienced in 2012. Bridge gets faster with every upgrade. Even when using Bridge to view a 50 megapixel file at 100% it only causes a momentary hesitation.

 

When searching the archive on the thunderbolt drive, usually by keyword, same thing. Fast and efficient. When a search turns up thousands of images then Bridge first builds thumbnails from the images displayed on the screen. Go down the page and Bridge will switch to building thumbnails for the images newly displayed. The thumbnails are built as fast as you can look at the images, so there is really no waiting.

 

I am also concerned with importing the RAWS into lightroom, the creation of Lightroom sidecar files, and the necessity of using only Lightroom to move your RAW and sidecar files amongst your drives. I think this last requirement is Adobe usurping the function of the Apple OS and can lead to all kinds of mischief. At the time Lightroom came on the scene, Adobe and Apple were engaged in a Tasmanian death match, so I have to wonder.

 

One size does not fit all, so if I was processing on the road, or from a less powerful laptop, or needed the speed of news, or was doing assignments, I would be using a different setup.

 

Maybe Lightroom, maybe not.

[Sally]

18 hours ago, Thomas Kyhn said:

 

You're right! I wasn't aware that it worked with the minus button, I always used the Delete option in the contextual menu, which for some reason only deletes the last of the selected keywords. In any case, if you have a long list of keywords and you want to delete some further down the list, you'd then have to scroll back and forth between the minus button and the keywords in question. As a workaround I usually group keywords to be delete under another keyword I want to delete and then delete the latter.

No, just highlight the individual keywords holding control and then click the minus button.  

[Thomas Kyhn]

21 minutes ago, Sally said:

19 hours ago, Thomas Kyhn said:

You're right! I wasn't aware that it worked with the minus button, I always used the Delete option in the contextual menu, which for some reason only deletes the last of the selected keywords. In any case, if you have a long list of keywords and you want to delete some further down the list, you'd then have to scroll back and forth between the minus button and the keywords in question. As a workaround I usually group keywords to be delete under another keyword I want to delete and then delete the latter.

No, just highlight the individual keywords holding control and then click the minus button.  

 

I'm not quite sure I follow you here. If you have a long list of keywords and you want to delete keywords further down the list, you have to first scroll down to highlight the keywords, and when you do that, i.e. scroll down, the top section of the keyword list – where the minus button is located – disappears from view, so you have to then scroll back up to the top of the list in order to be able to click the minus button.

[Graham]

Quote

I useiMatch by Photools.com. There is no image retouching/editing capability. It is all cataloging of the image database. Keywording capabilities are nice and can be thesaurus based if you build the thesaurus. 

Another vote for Imatch here.  It can have quite a learning curve, but it is very capable.  A new version, IMatch 2020, has been teased by the developer, but it has not been released yet.

 

Photo Mechanic 6 is also an excellent browser with lots of capabilities to manage keywords, and the cataloguing function (it will be called PM6+) will be good once it is out of beta (where it has been for a long time).  Registered users of PM6 can, however, use the betas and help contribute towards its features or help find bugs.

 

Neither has image editing capabilities.

[Thomas Kyhn]

After following this thread, I decided to give Photo Mechanic another try. I'm sure it's every bit as good as people say, when it comes to functionality; the interface, though, is a little clunky and somewhat reminiscent of Visual Basic, which is a shame.

[Sally]

46 minutes ago, Thomas Kyhn said:

 

I'm not quite sure I follow you here. If you have a long list of keywords and you want to delete keywords further down the list, you have to first scroll down to highlight the keywords, and when you do that, i.e. scroll down, the top section of the keyword list – where the minus button is located – disappears from view, so you have to then scroll back up to the top of the list in order to be able to click the minus button.

Ok I think I see what you mean. I don’t find the scrolling difficult, but then I have my keywords in a complicated hierarchy so not necessarily everything is showing. The alternative is to search for those keywords you want to delete in the bar then you will only have them showing in your list so less scrolling involved.

[Thomas Kyhn]

1 minute ago, Sally said:

Ok I think I see what you mean. I don’t find the scrolling difficult, but then I have my keywords in a complicated hierarchy so not necessarily everything is showing. The alternative is to search for those keywords you want to delete in the bar then you will only have them showing in your list so less scrolling involved.

 

I ended up with an enormous amount of keywords after using the Alamy bridge Lightroom plugin (my own fault, as I stupidly transferred all keywords from Alamy back to Lightroom), and I've spent many hours deleting unnecessary keywords from my Lightroom library. As I had to go through the keywords to find the ones I wanted to delete, using the minus button would have required a lot of scrolling up and down.

[Sally]

21 minutes ago, Thomas Kyhn said:

 

I ended up with an enormous amount of keywords after using the Alamy bridge Lightroom plugin (my own fault, as I stupidly transferred all keywords from Alamy back to Lightroom), and I've spent many hours deleting unnecessary keywords from my Lightroom library. As I had to go through the keywords to find the ones I wanted to delete, using the minus button would have required a lot of scrolling up and down.

Yes, the fetch options in the plugin take a bit of figuring out. What I have learned to do regularly is first to Fetch using ‘merge’ which merges with any existing keywords, then Fetch again using ‘replace’ which removes the unnecessary repeated keywords. Then of course it's easy to do a purge of keywords not used by any images.

Edited January 12, 2020 by Sally

[MDM]

17 hours ago, Bill Brooks said:

 

I am not blind to Lightroom's charms. It is a great program. As part of my Adobe photo subscription I have a up to date copy of Lightroom Classic on my boot drive. I watch the Lightroom videos and fire it up yearly for educational purposes.

 

However for my exclusively stock photo workflow I know that Bridge for selecting keepers, Adobe Camera Raw for preliminary processing of keepers, Bridge for processed RAW renumbering and keywording, back to ACR to output a TIFF from the keyworded processed RAW to be then finished in Photoshop, Photoshop action to output a Alamy JPG from the finished keyworded TIFF. All works for me

 

I then save the processed RAW and the final TIFF masterfile to my Photo Archive that is on an external Thunderbolt Drive.

 

I believe that the keywording in Bridge is more robust than Lightroom and being able to order your supertags to the top of the heap instead of alphabetical makes the supertag selection in AIM go much faster.

 

As to speed.

 

With the exception of the Photo Archive drive, all applications are contained, and work is processed, on a 1 TB SSD memory boot drive in a desktop iMac with 32 gig of RAM. When the finished files are moved to the Thunderbolt Archive drive, then their duplicates and Bridge cache are deleted from the SSD drive.

 

File compression is turned off, thumbnails are medium size embedded in the file, the cache for the SSD is non existent once you delete the SSD images. I am running Bridge on a powerful computer in 2020 so I do not experience any of the problems with slowness you experienced in 2012. Bridge gets faster with every upgrade. Even when using Bridge to view a 50 megapixel file at 100% it only causes a momentary hesitation.

 

When searching the archive on the thunderbolt drive, usually by keyword, same thing. Fast and efficient. When a search turns up thousands of images then Bridge first builds thumbnails from the images displayed on the screen. Go down the page and Bridge will switch to building thumbnails for the images newly displayed. The thumbnails are built as fast as you can look at the images, so there is really no waiting.

 

I am also concerned with importing the RAWS into lightroom, the creation of Lightroom sidecar files, and the necessity of using only Lightroom to move your RAW and sidecar files amongst your drives. I think this last requirement is Adobe usurping the function of the Apple OS and can lead to all kinds of mischief. At the time Lightroom came on the scene, Adobe and Apple were engaged in a Tasmanian death match, so I have to wonder.

 

One size does not fit all, so if I was processing on the road, or from a less powerful laptop, or needed the speed of news, or was doing assignments, I would be using a different setup.

 

Maybe Lightroom, maybe not.

 

Not a lot of point in arguing this one out as it would be very difficult to quantify without doing some serious experiments. I was really asking about your statement "I think both keyword and search functions in Bridge are more robust than anything else available." as that has never been my finding. But each to his own. 

 

There is a misconception in what you say there though which I have made bold in quoting you. You don't have to move files and folders around in Lightroom itself and it is often slower than simply using the OS to do the moves and then reinstate the links to the files and folders. This is the way I normally do things and it doesn't lose anything (previews, metadata, labels, ratings etc) in the process. I used to find that moving anything outside Bridge and it would require rebuilding the previews and metadata. 

[Vincent Lowe]

I use Lightroom, Photoshop and Adobe Bridge but for cataloguing, keywording etc, definitely IMatch

[Harry Harrison]

On 10/01/2020 at 20:59, Phil said:

With Irident X-Transformer's Fuji RAF>DNG converter it seems that Fuji's camera film sim profiles are carried thru metadata and can be changed in LR's Camera Profiles. 

Thanks for that, I've tried the demo and it seems to work fine on the downloaded X-Pro-3 files, correction profiles available as you say and seemingly their own camera profile - Iridient Standard v2 (Fuji X-Pro3).

[Phil]

2 hours ago, Harry Harrison said:

Thanks for that, I've tried the demo and it seems to work fine on the downloaded X-Pro-3 files, correction profiles available as you say and seemingly their own camera profile - Iridient Standard v2 (Fuji X-Pro3).

 

Good - glad it worked.    I have an X-T1 and X-T2 so was not able to test with a newer Fuji camera. 

 

It was not certain to me even after some research that older versions of LR like my V6 would take the Fuji profiles in the X-Trans .dng files metadata due to LRs using Adobe's Camera RAW engine that Adobe stopped updating with newer camera info - whereas Irident refreshes X-Trans periodically for newer Fuji cameras.   This stuff makes my head hurt sometimes.

 

[Harry Harrison]

19 minutes ago, Phil said:

so was not able to test with a newer Fuji camera

I found some X-Pro3 sample files for download here, pretty gloomy images but fine for this purpose of course.

[Harry Harrison]

1 hour ago, Phil said:

Good - glad it worked.

Just one more observation, one of those downloaded X-Pro3 test files (Hays Galleria) did work with Adobe DNG converter but the Iridient converted file is much better once  both are brought into Lightroom and compared side by side, sharper and cleaner but in no way over-sharpened. So I'm guessing that the Adobe DNG converter maybe didn't take on board any dialled in Fuji default sharpening, very plain to see whatever the reason. I'm going to have to try converting some of my Fuji X100 files already in Lightroom to see if Iridient does a better job with them as well.

Edited January 13, 2020 by Harry Harrison

[Phil]

1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

Just one more observation, one of those downloaded X-Pro3 test files (Hays Galleria) did work with Adobe DNG converter but the Iridient converted file is much better once  both are brought into Lightroom and compared side by side, sharper and cleaner but in no way over-sharpened. So I'm guessing that the Adobe DNG converter maybe didn't take on board any dialled in Fuji default sharpening, very plain to see whatever the reason. I'm going to have to try converting some of my Fuji X100 files already in Lightroom to see if Iridient does a better job with them as well.

 

Fuji's X-Trans sensor has a different photosite arrangement from conventional Bayer sensors.  It likes a different demosaic algorithm from Bayer sensors and Irident apparently has a better handle on it than Adobe does or did in earlier versions of their LR/PS ACR engine.