Product Reviews

Originally derived from Aldus Fetch, Extensis Portfolio is a cross-platform image catalogue and search engine. The upgrade to version 4.0 brings with it a standalone server application.

There are two phases to using Portfolio: creating the image catalogue; and setting up a server to enable others to view it. Although the database is fairly slow to create, this is excusable as the image thumbnails are held in the actual database, which means the original file isn't modified, and the thumbnails are viewable even when remote volumes or CDs aren't mounted.

You create a database either by dragging and dropping (if you're adding groups of images) or you can catalogue whole volumes of thousands of images. This is controlled via a dialog box and you can specify the generation and extraction of keywords. File names, volumes, path names, comments in JPEG and QuickTime files, and so on, can be used as sources for this information. Mappings relate different standard descriptions, such as IPTC or Photoshop, to predefined fields in the catalogue and you can create custom fields.

Portfolio will extract or generate previews of the items you catalogue - in the case of video, it'll take the first frame, if no other preview is specified. However, sometimes this captures a meaningless black frame, and Portfolio is unable to generate a preview of MPEG video, unless one is specified via QuickTime. The translators are component-based, though, and additional file type support could be added or extended quite easily by Extensis.

It's possible to look at a preview of an image or movie using QuickTime and other translators. This enables users to see the content without owning the original creator applications.

You can export catalogues or galleries (custom views of items) to HTML and JPEG thumbnails. It's easy to customise layouts by modifying the templates using the supplied dialog boxes - a mixture of macros and HTML is used. Extensis has

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also released a Web component to the server which makes publishing Web catalogues of images easier.

The keyword system for descriptions within the database is well-designed, and enables the creation of distinct categories for classifying images. You can add keywords to one image or groups of images, and you can control keyword usage via a master keyword list.

It's possible to restrict the choice of keywords from a master keyword list for one or many catalogues. It's also possible to search and replace for keywords across galleries.

There are four methods for describing an item within Portfolio: the thumbnail; a description field; the keywords; and the mapped fields. These provide a very flexible means of representing the content of the items in a catalogue.

There are extensive facilities for searching the database. Searching has been well thought out from a cross-platform point of view, as you can specify both Mac file type and creator, and Windows-based extensions. It's also possible to search on colour model, from Lab to YUV to CYMK and RGB. The results create galleries from a database. You can store these galleries for later use, which makes managing a large database much easier. The descriptions and keywords make this management especially simple.

Portfolio can be controlled using AppleScript (and Visual Basic), which allows for integration with other applications or timed operation (example scripts are supplied). A good example might be to integrate Portfolio with ColourSync profiles and QuarkXPress.

The supplied documentation was well-written and thorough, with plenty of diagrams, screenshots and a good index. The sections explaining how to plan an image catalogue and the use of keywords were particularly well-executed. There are 30-day demo versions of the software available from Extensis' Web site, along with all the documentation. There's also a free, separate, read-only browser product, which means you can easily distribute read-only catalogues.

Portfolio is a mature and well-thought-out application for managing images for either single users or a large organisations with full client server setups. The addition of a dedicated server product and free image browsing applications make this a straightforward and fast solution for large workgroups. The simplicity of using a single client for both single users and networks, together with the keywords functions prove a winning combination. Portfolio hits the spot for the single and corporate user alike, and is a bargain for both.