Advice on transfer of data from iView to Lightroom/Aperture.
I have an extensive iView catalog with in excess of 30,000 images. There's a considerable amount of keywording per image, and hundreds of separate 'catalog sets' (projects) currently active. I'm looking to switch to either Lightroom or Aperture and I know that if I sync data in iView all the keywords and caption info will be embedded in the file and will appear in Lightroom/Aperture when I import the images.
However I also want to take the extensive catalog sets structure as well, and I know iView utilizes the metadata structure to carry this info. I can confirm this if I take a sample file and look in File>File info in PS CS2 where there is an iView Media Pro information pane in the metadata containing much of the info I need.
Shifting the file from this old Mac G5 computer with CS2 to a new Intel Mac running CS3 the iView pane is missing in the metadata window but peeking into Advanced>MediaPro:Catalog Sets(bag container) all my Catalog Sets are listed there numerically.
Now, does anyone know if I can utilize this additionally stored data as the basis for re-establishing my catalog sets in Lightroom/Aperture?
I have Lightroom 2 running as a demo and have pulled in some images to try it and despite trying all the various metadata view options I cannot 'see' the additional iView info that is in the 'Advanced' location of the metadata pane which is visible in PS CS3.
Any advice or suggestions for making this visible or otherwise accessing it?
(The last resort is to create the Catalog Sets as new keywords in iView and transfer them that way - but thats a fair amount of work I'd rather not tackle unless I really need to.)
There's a program called annoture - that may help you. From memory, it can help sync metadata between iview and aperture - though I've never used it, so can't speak for how useful it is.
To be quite honest, I ditched any kind of structure when I went with Aperture a couple of years ago - I simply store everything in daily folders (year/month/day) and access via keywords and smart albums (query based on metadata). At the minute I've something like 188K images in a single Aperture library - one reason why I never went with LR as it couldn't cope with the library size! I think it handles large libraries a little bit better in V2 now though.
Re. the metadata panel in CS3 - you can find an alternate set of panels at john Beardsworth's website here. Think there may be a CS4/EM panel too.
Hi John I think annoture was also mentioned on the luminous landscape webpages. LR is slow when you get lots of images in a single library and corrupt images can be a bit of a problem too. Im using dedicated software for each job. Photomechanic frontend to weed out the shots that dont make the cut. Sometimes Lightroom, Capture one and ACR to look after my RAW. I was looking at iView to catalog but I haven't go this far yet as Im still moving from PC to MAC. I did notice that iView had been upgraded to MS Expression and Im not too sure on how good this is?
PhotoMechanic is excellent - I've been using for several years.
iView/MS Expression is fantastic for managing images, and I have all mine in it, but I've stuck with the V3 as my attempts to upgrade to th MS Expression version created havoc.
Although stable and pretty reliable, I've had various problems with V3, such as weird metadata writing where viewing synced metadata with Bridge says one thing and viewed in the File Info box directly from the image says something else. iView blame Adobe, Adobe blame iView, neither can fix it.
I also get truncated text in certain fields so captions get cut off after a fixed number of characters - which is a real pain, and also very strange little characters creep into text. But the real puzzler is iView's ability to duplicate keywords and split the images sets up arbitrarily - that one has them stumped and they've never tried to remedy it.
Good programme, but has foibles! My fear is that MS will ditch it, and I like the idea of saving vast acres of drive space by using Aperture or Lightroom's image-creation-only-on-export way of working.
Having said all that though I've not seen ANY programme that is as fast, intuitive, and powerful at image management as iView - it really is spectacularly good, and worth a demo if you want that style of management software.
Discussion
4 repliesI have an extensive iView catalog with in excess of 30,000 images. There's a considerable amount of keywording per image, and hundreds of separate 'catalog sets' (projects) currently active. I'm looking to switch to either Lightroom or Aperture and I know that if I sync data in iView all the keywords and caption info will be embedded in the file and will appear in Lightroom/Aperture when I import the images.
However I also want to take the extensive catalog sets structure as well, and I know iView utilizes the metadata structure to carry this info. I can confirm this if I take a sample file and look in File>File info in PS CS2 where there is an iView Media Pro information pane in the metadata containing much of the info I need.
Shifting the file from this old Mac G5 computer with CS2 to a new Intel Mac running CS3 the iView pane is missing in the metadata window but peeking into Advanced>MediaPro:Catalog Sets(bag container) all my Catalog Sets are listed there numerically.
Now, does anyone know if I can utilize this additionally stored data as the basis for re-establishing my catalog sets in Lightroom/Aperture?
I have Lightroom 2 running as a demo and have pulled in some images to try it and despite trying all the various metadata view options I cannot 'see' the additional iView info that is in the 'Advanced' location of the metadata pane which is visible in PS CS3.
Any advice or suggestions for making this visible or otherwise accessing it?
(The last resort is to create the Catalog Sets as new keywords in iView and transfer them that way - but thats a fair amount of work I'd rather not tackle unless I really need to.)
To be quite honest, I ditched any kind of structure when I went with Aperture a couple of years ago - I simply store everything in daily folders (year/month/day) and access via keywords and smart albums (query based on metadata). At the minute I've something like 188K images in a single Aperture library - one reason why I never went with LR as it couldn't cope with the library size! I think it handles large libraries a little bit better in V2 now though.
Re. the metadata panel in CS3 - you can find an alternate set of panels at john Beardsworth's website here. Think there may be a CS4/EM panel too.
Ian
iView/MS Expression is fantastic for managing images, and I have all mine in it, but I've stuck with the V3 as my attempts to upgrade to th MS Expression version created havoc.
Although stable and pretty reliable, I've had various problems with V3, such as weird metadata writing where viewing synced metadata with Bridge says one thing and viewed in the File Info box directly from the image says something else. iView blame Adobe, Adobe blame iView, neither can fix it.
I also get truncated text in certain fields so captions get cut off after a fixed number of characters - which is a real pain, and also very strange little characters creep into text. But the real puzzler is iView's ability to duplicate keywords and split the images sets up arbitrarily - that one has them stumped and they've never tried to remedy it.
Good programme, but has foibles! My fear is that MS will ditch it, and I like the idea of saving vast acres of drive space by using Aperture or Lightroom's image-creation-only-on-export way of working.
Having said all that though I've not seen ANY programme that is as fast, intuitive, and powerful at image management as iView - it really is spectacularly good, and worth a demo if you want that style of management software.