Time to let go of iView Multimedia Pro

April 11th, 2008

The advent of digital changed nearly every aspect of the photography workflow. Shooters and programmers tried to wrap their heads around the new technology while keeping the process as close to the old days as possible. Your computer wouldn’t ask you what to do with pictures when you plugged a card in, and it took some old-school pc skills to process, archive, and display images. Before the days of picasa, f-spot, iphoto and the like you had to mine the internet to find the little gems like Photo Mechanix and iView multimedia.
Photo Mechanix was a lightweight image viewer that had great batch renaming, but problems with the rest of the features. iView Pro was great from the start. Cataloging, sorting, editing and batch processing all in one. Of course iView tried to improve their product through two new versions. The first update to 2.5 pro was great, more undo’s, some better web gallery templates, etc. The upgrade to 3 was pure evil however. Plenty of crashes, bugs, and the complete lack of an undo function when deleting images from a catalog.

When iView decided to put out a progressively shittier product they piqued the interest of Microsoft. Microsoft made a bid for the company, which resulted in the company shutting down all development and customer support while they waited for their fat buy out checks. The product disappeared for three years, and now a bastardized version called Microsoft Expression Media is out. The trial version crashes, stops responding, and is general piece of shit. Like Vista SP1, the fun now sets you back $300. Like we needed anymore reasons to get behind Adobe’s Lightoom, but now we have another.

With no support for newer camera raw files, my old copy of iView is now retired. Between Bridge and Lightroom I have a new workflow that is actually better than the iView approach, but I still miss being able to dump files in a catolog, sort em, export and delete the catalog. With thousands of photographers on the market (and more of you who think you need pro tools) I can’t understand why something has not been released to replace iView. Aperture is usable, but slow and counter-intuitive. iPhoto is just plain horrible, forcing you to surrender control over your files. Picasa was never meant for more than organization of images and posting online, so like gThumb and f-spot there is just not enough power in the program (the price is right though).

So rest in peace iView, and may your ashes be cloned by some FOSS developer and released for debian linux.

Entry Filed under: Adobe, Photography