Catalogue Shopping

Photographers need to catalogue their images. A catalogue is a visual list of your pictures that helps you organize, search and retrieve them.

There are a lot of photo editing software but very few for digital asset management (i.e. cataloging). There are many cloud-based cataloging solutions for larger businesses but the high cost of these pushes them out of reach of most photographers.

Media Pro, a popular cataloging application for many years, was discontinued in August 2018.

I started using Media Pro in 1998 when it was called iView Multimedia. Back then, the British software company gave it away as shareware. In the early 2000s, iView Multimedia changed its name to iView Media Pro and gave it a $60 price.

The software was sold to Microsoft in 2006. Many pundits said at the time that this was the kiss of death.

Microsoft did next to nothing with the product. Changed the splash screen, changed a few icons, changed the name to Microsoft Expression Media and increased the price.

Phase One bought the software in 2010 from Microsoft. Everyone assumed the only reason Phase One bought it was to incorporate a cataloging function into its photo editing software, Capture One, to better compete with Adobe Lightroom. This is exactly what happened.

Phase One continued to sell the cataloging software as a standalone with Media Pro as its new name. But unfortunately Phase One made the product worse by removing some functionality and making the UI very ugly and difficult to read. Phase One neglected the software for a few more years and then killed it in 2018.

Capture One’s implementation of its cataloging feature leaves a lot to be desired because it actually has less functionality than the original standalone version of Microsoft Expression or Media Pro.

If you use Media Pro on your Mac, you know it won’t function if you upgrade to macOS 10.15 later this year. Media Pro is a 32-bit application and macOS 10.15 will be 64-bit only.

Some Cataloging Options

If you’re shopping for new catalogue software for your photos, there aren’t many options.

1. Adobe Lightroom has built-in cataloging and is probably the most well known.

2. There are a number of Lightroom competitors that have recently added cataloging. But some of these offer very limited cataloging functionality, cannot catalogue offline images (which is the main point of a catalogue), can’t do batch functions (e.g. batch rename, batch caption, batch lossless rotate), can’t do advanced searches across various IPTC fields, can’t search multiple (closed) catalogues, or a number of other functions that the old Microsoft Expression / Media Pro could do.

Some examples are: Capture One, ACDSee Photo Studio, On1 Photo Raw, and DxO PhotoLab. I’ve probably left out some others.

3. Neofinder (for Mac) and abeMeda (for Windows) have been around for twenty years. This software was originally for cataloging music CDs. But if you’ve used Media Pro then Neofinder will be a disappointment.

4. Camera Bits has been saying since 2012 that it’s developing cataloging software. But so far, nothing. Apparently a public beta will be released in April 2019.

This catalogue software will only be sold bundled with Camera Bits photo browser at a yet-to-be announced price. Catalogue software that’s tied to another application can mean you’re stuck buying both and perhaps even stuck in a proprietary system.

Added October 2020: After eight years in development, Camera Bits has finally released Photo Mechanic Plus. It does work but it’s clunky, it’s not intuitive so there’s a learning curve, and it’s expensive.

5. A free option is digiKam which is open source but I’ve never used it.

6. Photo Supreme might be worth consideration. But for Mac users, this seems to be Windows software ported to Mac and it doesn’t follow any Mac conventions.

7. Cloud-based digital asset management tools like MediaValet are not aimed at photographers because few photographers could afford the monthly fees.

8. In the comments below, “Brian In Alberta” mentions PhoTools IMatch software which looks good but is Windows only.

So far there are no great options for pro photographers to catalogue their photos on a Mac computer beyond OS 10.14. I think most photographers will gravitate toward Adobe Lightroom simply because it’s bundled together with Photoshop.