Having taken a week off after my lengthy Idimager review, I decided to jump back on the wagon and get right back to reviewing products. I randomly chose a product that I’ve been looking at for awhile now… so, please join me in welcoming my newest review… for Extensis Portfolio 8.51.

Application	Version	Review Date	Price	Review By	Technology
Extensis Portfolio	8.51 (revision a)	May 17, 2008	$199.95	Andy	PC/MAC
Website	http://www.extensis.com

General Overview

Extensis provides the following description on their website:

Surprisingly affordable, Portfolio quickly handles the tasks of locating, organizing, archiving and publishing your digital work.

After reading this, I was on a mission to see how well the software held up to this statement when it comes to managing photographs. Now, I must admit, having just reviewed both Pro 2 and Idimager, any future DAM review will most likely be compared directly to these products. They both scored very well in my opinion with Idimager 4.0 being the best DAM product I have used to date. So, I was hopeful Portfolio would continue the streak of excellent DAM applications….

As you will see below, however, Portfolio falls a bit short of these applications in most categories and even though it shows promise, just doesn’t rise to the same level as Pro 2 or Idimager. Read on for all the details!

Installation

The installation of Portfolio began with your standard installation screens shown below:

I chose the custom installation because I like to know what a program is about to install on my computer (and hopefully why). Upon hitting next:

As you can see above, besides the main application itself, portfolio can install some other components: Express Palette, Contextual Menu, Desktop Icon and NetPublish Dynamic. I’ll explain these items in detail a bit later on but for now I chose to let all items install and hit Next to continue the install. I was presented with the progress screen and waited for the install to complete… and waited… and waited some more:

Surprisingly, it took over 4 minutes to install the application. Both Pro 2 and Idimager installed in just under a minute on the same test machine so this is quite a bit longer. Once the install was complete, I received the “ready” signal:

And, thus the installation was complete. I’m not sure which component might have been the culprit for the long installation time but the time it took to install is worth noting. I then hit Finish and started the program.

User Interface (GUI)

Once I started the program, I again encountered a delay. It took almost 45 seconds before the application loaded and the main GUI was displayed. Subsequent load times were much faster but still ranged between 10 and 30 (!) seconds. Just to be sure the PC was working ok, I loaded up both Pro 2 and Idimager.. each took about 10 seconds to load up consistently.

Anyway, here is the initial screen that is displayed upon getting into the program:

As you can see in the image above, the GUI is pretty minimalist and is broken up into 3 panels. The Galleries and Folders panels can be resized and moved around the screen or docked to the left or right side. There are some other panels that you can display as windows: Master Keywords List, Catalog and Category views and a few others. Unfortunately, none of these other windows can be docked. Also, you cannot dock the preview pane, image details or histogram onto the main GUI either.

The first thing you need to do is create a new catalog which is the basis of where images are stored. You can create as many catalogs as you’d like and it is up to you if you want one main or multiple smaller catalogs. In my case, I created a new catalog and was presented with the following screen:

This screen allows you to choose the type of catalog you are creating and whether or not to enable screen previews which are displayed initially when you choose to preview an image. Using previews will display your images faster and you can choose the size of the previews in the catalog preferences (more on that later).

Portfolio will auto create certain fields and metadata syncing pathways depending on the type chosen. This is a nice touch and is useful for initial setup. I chose Photo Library and hit continue. The catalog was then created and I was displayed with the main gui again:

As I mentioned in past reviews… I am a GUI snob. I like my GUI’s to look “cutting edge” and like them to be fully customizable: background colors, thumbnail info, panel locations and workspace choices. Portfolio’s GUI can best be described as “clean” - you have little control over the general look of the GUI like background colors and toolbar icons (although the icons are nicely drawn). There is no mechanism to create and save workspaces which I feel is a very valuable tool in a DAM product. I like to have at least 5 different views to work with depending on the activity I’m performing. For Image Metadata editing, I like using a large editing panel while showing a small thumbnail strip and perhaps a medium preview window. For keywording, I like to have a full Thumbnail panel with only the keyword or catalog info displayed. As Portfolio doesn’t support workspaces, you must change things manually each time you want to have a different view. This is something I would love to see changed in V9.

Portfolio does offer the ability to change how your thumbnails appear:

The custom view comes complete with 9 default views that will display your thumbnails with different background colors and frames around the images. The default views are nice and provide a starting point for customizing them for your own use. If you want to display things like keywords and IPTC fields, you’ll need to build this manually and save it as your own view for future use. This is accomplished by using the Customize View screen:

You can choose the individual fields to display, change their text color, font and size and also choose how the overall gallery and item background colors will appear. Unfortunately, you cannot have multiple items on the same line (I always like to display the photo width x height x resolution together). This screen is also the only place you can choose which size thumbnails to display and you are limited to only 4 choices: 32, 64, 112 & 256. While most folks will not change the size of the thumbnails often, I like to adjust them as needed when I want to look at details and the lack of a slider on the main screen is rather inconvenient.

In any event, after I adjusted the thumbs, my main screen looked like this:

Not a bad looking thumbnail display.. but I just wish I had more control over how items are placed underneath (you can see I had to show the width and length on separate lines).

Also missing…. there are no icons on or around the thumbnails to indicate things like sync/out-of-sync, shortcuts to metadata edit or anything. Its certainly a clean display, but perhaps the next version can add a bit of functionality and customization into the mix.

As I mentioned, there isn’t a dedicated preview panel so to see a larger image, you click the Preview button or double click the image which brings up the preview in a new tab:

From this tab, you can choose to edit the image (external editor only) or view the full size image which will then load the original file (which takes longer than just viewing the preview).

In conclusion, I found the GUI to be simple and clean.. but perhaps too simple. There isn’t much ability for the user to customize the interface - the lack of preview, IPTC, and histogram panels is bit unfortunate and the inability to define and save your own workspaces is disappointing. I also miss the ability to fully customize my thumbnail display and place info under each photo in the exact format I’d like.

Metadata Handling

Moving right along, we come to the bread and butter of DAM applications: Metadata. So, how does Portfolio handle metadata?

Your only access point into the image metadata is from the properties button (or Alt-Enter shortcut):

The above window will display and is the same window whether you choose to edit metadata for 1 image or 1000 images. As you can see, you have access to modify the Filename and Description on the first tab, Keywords on the second and the other IPTC/XMP fields on the third:

Unfortunately, editing the fields on the above screen is awkward. You cannot just choose the field and click an edit box alongside the field name. Instead, you must choose the field and then click the Edit button to open a new box, enter the data and file the entry.

The biggest flaw comes when you try to add the same data to multiple images using this screen… that is, you cannot. If you choose 40 images to edit, each one is presented to you seperately. Each must be modified on its own and the only interaction between photos is to move between them using the arrows at the bottom of the screen. I was really surprised by this and tried many ways to work around this thinking I must be missing something. The only way you can add the same data to multiple files is by using the Edit Field Values Dialog:

This dialog box works from the main explorer window and allows you to perform a Replace, Delete, Delete All or Add to a field value for one or more photos. Now, I like this idea and you do have access to a large number of XMP values. I wish this was presented in a more flexible manner but in the end, if you want to say add a copyright message to all your images, this is the only way to accomplish it in Portfolio.

Once you are done editing your metadata, you’ll need to sync the data back into the image. Like most DAM applications, changes are automatically saved to the database but must be manually written into the images.

I wish there was an indicator on the thumbnails (or perhaps a filter) to indicate the changes are in the catalog only. When you first created the catalog, links were setup based on the type of catalog you choose. Since we chose to create a photo based catalog, our link were setup with this in mind. You can edit and modify these links by usin gthe Metadata Properties Settings dialog box:

You can also choose to define custom user fields and choose the XMP fields to link then to as I did here just as a sample.. this is a nice touch:

Once you sync the images, the metadata appears correctly in the images.

Finally, you can edit keywords directly for each image by showing the Edit Keywords window:

Typing in a new keyword and clicking Add will add the keyword to the image.

That wraps up metadata in Portfolio. In the end, while you can certainly access and edit your metadata, I would have liked for multiple photo editing from the Image Details dialog. I did like the ability to edit the Field Values directly from the explorer but would love for this box to be a panel instead and for it to allow multiple edits and the ability to save and recall specific values for fields (ie: save and open copyright data for future additions).

Search Capabilities

Searching in Portfolio is done via 2 main functions: The Quick Find and Find routines. The Quick Find can be used to search your current gallery for any photos that contain the phrase entered in the Quick Find box:

In this example, I had my All Items Gallery chosen and entered “tree” in the quickfind box. The quick find will search all the catalog metadata looking for this value for the gallery you are in and displays the results in the Find Results Gallery. You can define which fields will be searched from the Preferences.

The more advanced way to do a search in Portfolio is via the Find function which can be started using the Find button or Ctrl-F shortcut:

In my example above, I was searching the entire database for photos that had both the flower and sky keywords present. Once I hit the Find Button, the system quickly looks for any files that match this criteria. Note the Saved Finds dropdown… from here you have access to a very powerful feature of portfolio - smart galleries.

Smart galleries allow you to create dynamic albums that will automatically perform a Saved Find every time you visit that gallery. This is a very useful feature because it saves you from having to run complex searches to locate new images that might have been added to a database. I like this feature very much - it takes static galleries to a new level by allowing you to take a hands free approach to finding files. So long as you keyword and tag your images correctly, you can find these images via a simple click on a smart gallery.

Portfolio also allows you to located images using some pre-defined searches:

I like how Portfolio handles searches - specifically the ability to turn a search into a smart gallery. The ability to define what metadata should be searched is another nice feature as well.

The Kitchen Sink

Scriping

Portfolio does not offer any in-program scripting IDE but requires the use of Visual Basic and reference objects from Portfolio 8. While this approach will certainly allow you to create scripts, I find the lack of in-program support a key oversight in a program that costs around $200.

As Portfolio does not have versioning or a download utility, it’s time to just move on to the rest of the routines it does offer.

Batcher

Portfolio offers a small batch routine to convert or remane images:

From this routine, you can batch convert images to 4 different formats: JPG, TIFF, PixelLive and PixelSafe. To be honest, I’ve never heard of PixelLive or PixelSafe and needed to look them up on the internet. Turns out: PixelLive is an image format developed independently by Celartem Technology…. I’m not sure why Portfolio chose these 2 formats to include but they are there if you’d like to convert to them.

Slideshow

Portfolio also comes with a slideshow function:

As you can see, the slideshow loads with either a full screen or the original image size. There is a toolbar that lets you move from image to image or auto-scroll through images. You can only display a single XMP field at the bottom of the screen and do not have the ability to add transition effects, music, text or voice over information. You also cannot save your slideshow for viewing outside the program. Thus, in effect, the slideshow is useful as a photo viewer only.

Web Page Builder

Portfolio does include a rather extensive Web Page Builder that allows you create full website galleries from your photos:

As you can see in the screen above, when you first choose to build the site, you are presented with a choice of built-in templates to begin your site with. Each template is a bit different and offers some variety in how your gallery will be presented. After choosing a template and hitting Next:

You are next presented with a page where you can setup some display information for your website including the site name, a logo or graphic to display and html files for things like the page header and footer. Continuing onward:

You are next presented with the ability to define how your thumbnails will look. You can again choose from several pre-defined page styles or manually choose the info to appear from the full list of XMP fields. Hitting Next:

and you are brought to the Detail Page where you will be defining what will appear on the main photo details page. Again, you have a few page styles to choose from and you can also detail the data to show up here. You can view the source files or preview the web gallery at any time using the appropriate buttons. Hitting next brings us to the last page:

This page will allow you to define where to save your web gallery and provide a description of the the site for usage in the future. If you choose to Save a Copy, then you can use the website as a template and it will appear in the list on the front page.

Interestingly enough, you cannot FTP or publish your gallery directly from Portfolio but must rely on a 3rd party FTP tool to send your files. Also, you must rebuild the gallery each time you want to add a photo - you cannot just add to an existing gallery. Overall, the gallery tool is a nice addition to the program.

The Rest…

There are a few more items to touch upon. The first is the Windows Explorer Shell add-on tools that can be installed with the product:

Highlighting a file in explorer and then right clicking gives you access to Portfolio commands. You can add the file to an existing catalog, create a new catalog or open a catalog. Of course, doing so will then load Portfolio (unless already open) and present you with the Add Item dialog.

Another very nice addition that can be installed with the program is something called Portfolio Express. Basically, it is a windows service that runs in the background independent of Portfolio and is accessed by hitting the CTRL-SHIFT-P combo:

You’ll see you can choose a Portfolio database and then either view all the images in that database or you can do a search and limit what is displayed. You can then just drag and drop the thumbs to your target application (such as Photoshop) and continue on your way. To be honest, this is a really nice part of the application and is very helpful. It allows you to still access your database and leverage the ability to search that database without the need to have the entire application open all the time.

Conclusion

Well.. I must admit, Portfolio is an interesting application and one that I’m not sure how to describe fully.

Once loaded, I find that it performs fairly quickly and presents itself in a clean and simple manner. However, there are just too many areas that appear weak when the application focus is managing photography assets. With no scripting ability, the lack of a download application, and no versioning support, Portfolio is missing some much needed functionality that I’ve come to appreciate (and expect) in DAM applications. I am surprised there is no built in editing ability or batch functions beyond renaming and converting to a JPG or TIFF. The slideshow feature is limited to a full screen viewer and even though the web gallery tool is really nice, the lack of built in FTP leaves you once again looking beyond the application to get the job done.

Given the high price of the application, I expected much much more. Perhaps as part of a workgroup environment where you are sharing assets with other team members, Portfolio really shines. As a stand-along photo DAM however, I feel it misses the mark in many areas. At the end of the day, unless you really just need a program that will catalog your images and provide basic metadata and search capabilities, I feel there are better tools on the market.

Pros:

Smart Galleries: awesome concept and works very well in Portfolio

Portfolio Express Service: Great addition to allow you to find images in your database for use in 3rd party applications

Quick/Responsive: once loaded, searching and thumbnail display is quick

Web Gallery Tool: nice tool to create unique web galleries quickly and easily

Cons:

Scripting: None

Downloader: None

Metadata Handling: Weak - no real batch mode, no extensible XMP access

Versioning: None

Price: At just under $200, the package is quite expensive for the functionality presented!