Image archiving database?

I have been using a great little program called Imatch to categorize my images since about 2000. But it is starting to have trouble with stability and speed now that my archive has reached nearly 100,000 images. Anyone have any suggestions on products that can easily handle and categorize such a large database? I am a bit reluctant to switch since I have things very well organized and categorized into IPTC codes, but it has been very slow and unstable and I am afraid I may be forced to switch programs. I am on a Windows PC.

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com

How about more ram and a nice i7 quad core processor?

I just upgraded and everything runs soooooo smooth.

If it doesn't work, hey, you've got a better confuser.

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www.spiveyphoto.com
Canon 5D Mk II, S90

	lefturn99 wrote:
	How about more ram and a nice i7 quad core processor? I just upgraded and everything runs soooooo smooth. If it doesn't work, hey, you've got a better confuser.

I have 8GB in Windows Vista 64 bit and a less than one year old quad core processor. Don't think more would fix the problem. That won't make it more stable.

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com

Nope, you're in good shape. Can you start a new catalog?

I have no experience, but I've read that sports shooters and others with a large volume of images use Photo Mechanic.

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www.spiveyphoto.com
Canon 5D Mk II, S90

I am trying Adobe Lightroom 3 beta. It is a native 64 bit application. So far it seems very fast. I imported about 1/2 my images yesterday. It ran just fine in the background while I did other things and never noticed any performance degradation. Wish I could figure out a way to get my IPTC categories ported over from imatch. I have a big chunk of my images keyworded. Lightroom imports my keywords, but won't import the imatch IPTC categories, which are sort of like keywords.

My workflow is really starting to come along and integrate well with my web site. I have slightly over 1,000 images on my web site, pretty well all of them keyworded and captioned. They are all visible to the search engines and I can already see some traffic showing up. I sold an image last week to a drag racing web site. I absolutely LOVE photoshelter. They rock. They have an automatic export feature to Alamy stock house so I think I am going to try that out. I can semi-automatically send images from photoshelter to my other stock agency www.transtock.com. Photoshelter is just a dream come true for a commercial photographer. I upload the images once to photoshelter and from there can distribute them out all over the place, sell them online, integrate them into my own web site, allow other web sites to use them and link back to me, post images to several social networking sites, etc.

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com

More feedback on Lightroom 3 Beta 64 bit. So far I am VERY impressed. I have tried every single version of Lightroom and have never liked it. This is the first one that I have liked at all, and so far I like it a LOT. The main reason I am using it is to catalog my images. I prefer so far to do my image processing in Nikon Capture NX. But for updating metadata info and captioning pictures, Lightroom 3 just rocks. It is unbelievably fast. I imported 60,000 NEF images in about 4 hours. And so far dealing with those images is very fast. The tools to caption and handle the metadata is very intuitive and easy to use. The reason I liked imatch was the IPTC categories, but nobody really supports that and they don't pass out of imatch to places like Photoshelter. I have figured out that I need to use keywords instead, and Lightroom makes it very easy to standardize and assign keywords. I have sporadically keyworded images off and on in the past, and of course I have to keyword anything I send to my Photoshelter archive or stock houses. Lightroom makes this a simple, fast, and easy task.

I am still unsure about the image developer tools. So far I like the ones in Capture NX much better, but that could be because I know those tools much better. I will hold out on the jury for those and try to learn them in Lightroom before I pass final judgement. I will for sure be buying this when it hits the streets!

I wish I could get all my applications in 64 bit mode. That is SO much better than 32 bit mode. I guess the Apple people made the transition a few years ago with OS-X. We are just now getting there with Windows - FINALLY!

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com

Hello James, glad to hear your interest in Lightroom. I was digging around and found some links that may or may not be helpful as far as the IPTC.

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/WS436CA8E4-7E7B-4b4c-B522-1449D8F21CE0.html

http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/LR/Add+and+edit+IPTC+metadata+-+Basics

I didn't read all of this one but it talks about iMatch to Lightroom.
http://ptforum.photoolsweb.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=27684

http://ptforum.photoolsweb.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=52303

Also there are a few Lightroom blogs and podcasts if you want to look around on their websites. There are also a whole lot of add ons and presets to choose from.

http://lightroomkillertips.com/

Presets - http://lightroomkillertips.com/category/presets/

http://thelightroomlab.com/

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Thanks Jim. Only problem is those made my head hurt! Wow, way too much programing for me.

I am still trying to figure Lightroom out. It is quite a bit different than anything else I have used. Not sure yet if I like that or not. I do know the 64 bit beta version is WAY faster than the past versions I tried. That is nice and for the first time makes it possible for me to consider LIghtroom. Jury is still out on keywording and such. Not yet sure it is going to replace Imatch.

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James Pratt
www.advridermag.com
www.-james-pratt.com
www.motorcyclestock.com