articles/Software/extensisportfolio85-page2
by Mike McNamee Published
A RAW file that has been converted to monochrome by desaturation and then cropped, shows accurately in Adobe Bridge. However, the same file, when catalogued in Portfolio, shows as full colour, uncropped. This could be an issue were you to try using Portfolio to dragand- drop build an album or to make a slide show from Portfolio, it does not obey the sidecar file.
It is just this type of problem that programs such as Portfolio try to solve for you. After a bit (quite a lot actually) of initial spade work, Portfolio will put before you limited numbers of files that meet your search criteria - small enough, hopefully, to quickly scan and find the one you want. Let's suppose that you are asked for your Falkirk Wheel shot but you cannot quite recall where it is. You should have renamed it Falkirk_Wheel_ December07 but, like the rest of us, you didn't and now regret it. Providing you left the image in the Falkirk Shipping Co folder (which is the client you were going to shoot for when this photo opportunity arose!) then your shot of the Wheel will contain 'falkirk' in its key words (Portfolio adds the names in the file path automatically). A search for all files containing the tag 'falkirk' will pull out a small enough set of images to quickly eyeball to identify your target.
Portfolio Express is available as a standalone 'always on top' application to enable you to drag and drop files directly to your working application. Aside from the issues of RAW files (above) it would be a quick way of building album pages.
There are three main methods of displaying files that have been catalogued. Double clicking a thumbnail opens a near full-frame view. Thumbnails may also be dragged onto other applications, to place a file in that application. At the top, the six EPS files highlighted (blue) caused havoc with the cataloguing process, taking a significant chunk of the several hours needed to build the catalogue.
In this search we asked Portfolio to find CMYK images of Hahnemuhle papers shot with a 105mm macro lens . We knew that the shots were taken with a Nikon camera so we threw that in the files as well. Difficult words such as Hahnemuhle we frequently spell incorrectly so we truncated the search to 'hahn' - we always get the first four letters correct! The files located were set in 11 folders, five layers deep in the file tree and would be difficult to isolate one at a time. Portfolio brought all 20 files onto the thumbnail pane in a little under 15 seconds, all present and correct - easy peasy!
None of this excuses you from failing to keyword every shot diligently, but few of us have the time, unless it is part of our bread and butter workload. If you run a picture library you keyword everything so you can find it for clients and researchers, but we took our Falkirk Wheel 'because it was there' and were never sure if it would ever be used again! Keywording is, in any case, quite a skill in its own right and to be done properly it needs thought, care and development. Portrait photographers can usually make do with a folder named after the client!
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