Over time I’ve had several posts on Idimager the most recent of which was my learning that Idimager is now dead software, to be replaced by Photo Supreme.
As I have an enormous amount of time invested in tagging and organizing images in Idimager, I am not about to make the jump lightly; I need to know if key features in Idimager are still supported. The most important are:
- Easy image tagging
- Easy file management
I have a number of other custom-built items in Idimager (batch exports for various purposes to various places, automatic downloads from various folders for various reasons, custom recipes for altering and managing images) but I’m not as worried about those. It’s the two bullet points that are the killers.
From reading blog posts and making inquiries and checking the Photo Supreme forums, It seems that Photo Supreme continues Idimager’s legacy of easy and efficient tagging of images. Unfortunately, from the same forum, I learn that Photo Supreme does not do internal file and folder management (yet) and that kills if for me right now. From the forum sticky: (requires log in)
Tip 1: How to update catalog’s reference of resource paths when moving images on file-sytem:
a. outside of PSU, physically move or copy the current folder to the new location (e.g. from local disk to external harddisk, one local drive to another, or one area of file system to another)
b. in PSU, choose “By Folder” for Catalog view
c. right-click on the folder you just moved and select “Relocate Folder…” [ed. emphasis]
d. in the navigation dialog which opens, select the new location of the folder
e. verify by right-clicking on a thumbnail available in this new location and select “Locate in Windows Explorer”
f. if the option is available (it is greyed out when the media is disconnected) then the image should open and you know the catalog has updated the resource location
Note the emphasized item above. To relocate a folder I would have to individually find it in the new location. This destroys Photo Supreme’s utility for my particular case. Why?
I have a laptop that is my main computer. It has a 400 GB hard drive. 400 GB is a lot, but not nearly enough to contain all of my images. As it fills up, I regularly move the images out to an external hard drive (which has 2 TB). I store images by year/day folder arrangement to make it easy if I’m searching for a particular date in the file system. Photo Supreme isn’t getting a test drive because as of today, March 24, 2013, I’ve got 73 folders under the “2013” folder which would need to be individually relocated once I moved them to the external hard drive.
No thanks.
I could always move the entire “2013” folder at the end of the year, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t run out of space before then, and I’m unwilling to experiment to see what happens when I move the “2013” folder, and then dump a bunch of new folders into the moved “2013” folder later.
My principal philosophy here is that I’m unwilling to be a paying beta tester for the software, and I’m also unwilling to abandon a software I know works for something I don’t think will. So for now, I’m sticking with Idimager. That’s unfortunate because I have a nice 50% off discount for Photo Supreme sitting in my inbox.
Alas, I will wait until this software has matured a bit more. Photo Supreme is supposed to be an “integrated photo cataloging and photo management [software]…” but until it truly is, I’ll stick with the old.
PS. There’s an argument to be made in favor of Photo Supreme that no one has weighed in on, and I’m unwilling to be the tester: Would the time savings inside the software (Photo supreme is supposed to be way faster than Idimager) be sufficient to justify individually relocating hundreds of folders?
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