articles/Software/extensisportfolio85-page3
by Mike McNamee Published
Portfolio 8.8 arrived just in time. We were compiling the feature on 100mm lenses and were trying to locate all our images shot at 100mm or 105mm. Adobe Bridge can do this, but after 30 minutes the application self-destructed, crashed the computer and went on strike, complaining that there was insufficient disc space to complete the operation. Ours is not a typical computer. It has more than a terabyte of storage. However, we do have lots of files. For the record there are 82,000 on the RAID array for the operating system, 78,000 on the data RAID array and 33,500 files just for backups (to April 05) of Professional Imagemaker.
The first thing we had to do was build a 'Catalog'. This involves Portfolio looking at every file, extracting the file path data, so it may be used to keyword, and then assembling any metadata from camera or image files. This takes time and we needed to find out if it was to be a cupof- tea job or a let's-go-to-bed-and-leave-it job. The table shows the results of our experiments. Portfolio has a Fast Cataloguing facility which quickly assembles the main data (including the thumbnail) so you can get on and use it while it finishes the job in the background. This is particularly useful if you are doing a quick look and find you are in the wrong place - you can stop and start elsewhere. We scoped a few files to get our bearings and then started the long arduous process.
A summary of the table would say that you can expect to spend about 0.5 seconds for each file on a mixed business disc, 1 second for a full resolution D-SLR JPEG and 2 seconds for a D-SLR RAW file. The great casualty in this are EPS files which took a up to 10 minutes (each) to process - bad news for a graphic design agency, they seem to love EPS files more than most!
To put a more realistic placement on the figures, we catalogued a wholeday fashion shoot of 638 images mixed in as 991 files in RAW, TIFF and JPEG format along with XMP files. This took 4m 20s to fast catalogue and the entire job was done in 27 minutes. From this we conclude that cataloguing a wedding is a cup-of-tea process, but complete hard drives are an overnight job (several in fact). Having massive amounts of computing power available we simply did it in the background but kept away from InDesign and Photoshop work!
The program was not flawless. In spite of claiming multipage abilities for pdfs we could not find any, some RAW files refused to rotate in Portfolio but were Ok in Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW. Although a sidecar file is available as part of the building of the catalogue it is not 'consulted' by Portfolio in the making of the thumbnail or the showing of the enlarged view. Therefore if you do a conversion to monochrome and a crop in Adobe Bridge (both likely occurrences) Portfolio does not show you a cropped monochrome when it catalogues that file. Neither does it apply any corrections you may have made to your RAW files, so the thumbnail (and the enlarged view) are not colour-correct versions of your file. Portfolio therefore cannot be used to make decisions about a group of similar files for best exposure, sharpness, etc. If you are browsing a bunch of pictures, just looking for a pretty one to adorn a project, then Portfolio can get you into the area but not assist you in your final selection, you will probably need to go back to Bridge, Lightroom or Aperture to accomplish that task.
There are 0 days to get ready for The Society of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Thursday 1st January 1970
SWPP - Society of Wedding and Portrait Photographers
The Society of Photographers
Clwyd Chambers, Clwyd Street, Rhyl, Denbighshire, LL18 3LA, UK
Tel 00 44 (0) 1745 356935
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