IMatch has won thousands of users from all over the world. Both photo professionals and serious amateur photographers use IMatch as their image management tool of choice.
I have been using IMatch for just over 3 months and I find it to be a very
powerful image manager. Intuitive to use, excellent support and it has made
my life so much easier regarding the handling of my 3000+ images that are
being added to every day. I have it permanently opened and just drag whichever image I want to work on into PS and away I go. One of the best
$50.00 investments I have ever made. I cannot imagine working without it
now. You won't be dissappointed.
User at www.dpreview.com
(check the forums) |
| As a professional photographer, I have very special requirements about a digital image management system. I have been burned several times over the last couple of years, but I finally found the product that I want. Thank you for creating a great product!
John M, USA |
| I use IMatch with my Nikon digital cameras here at the studio and on my laptop when I'm outside. Excellent product. I immediately dropped <Product X> after I played with IMatch for only a few hours. I added my entire 60,000+ image collection in two days.
Randall Y., New Zealand |
| One word: Indispensable...
Hiroshito Y., Japan |
It's a wonderful program. I have a couple thousand images on over 40 CDs all
categorized and it's a snap to find what I'm after. It's a very powerful
package and I've barely touched the surface. It's amazing what some of the
power users have done. I'm satisfied right now being able to locate the
photo of that doorway down at the mission in San Juan Batista I took last
November. The whole category concept makes so much more sense then the
Thumbs Plus 'key words' thing. It's much more flexible. Support is fantastic
too.
Tom, USA |
I have used many image management products and have not come across a unique product like yours.
It took me less than one hour to own this product.
I am going to discard all my other image management software and keep this one.
Thanks very much for such an indispensable product...Please keep up the technical excellence !
Prasad C, USA |
Thank you for designing a great
product. I've been looking for over 2 years for a way to manage
my digital photo collection. The closest thing I found was
Cumulus but it wasn't a perfect fit. Your product gives me
everything I was looking for (actually 110% of what I was looking
for). Finally! My search is over.
David A, USA |
Thank you, thank you, thank you for
your wonderful application. It's what us photographers have been waiting
for.
Graham Q, United Kingdom |
First, let me say that IMatch 3 is
AWESOME! I have been searching for a program like yours for
several days and I was almost resigned to writing one myself.
Needless to say, I registered it today after only messing with it
last night. Good Work!!
Alan S, USA |
| This
review has been posted to a public news forum
and is reproduced by permission of the author.
For the past few days I've been trying out Photools IMatch and am really impressed. The program is designed to the needs of pro photographers.
It has an excellent IPTC editor which allows you to write IPTC data to batches of selected images. For organizing your images it uses a hierarchical category structure that works very well. You can use your own structure of categories, or import the official IPTC and Universal category systems. For the news industry, the IPTC is the way to go, but for stock shooting the Universal structure works really well. And you can use all the systems at the same time if you like. The viewing is based on parent/child relationships so if you select "animals & pets" the program will display all your thumbnails for all animals. If you select "birds", which is a child category of "animals & pets", then only birds will be displayed. The programmer has gone out of his way to make it fast and efficient for the user to assign images to multiple categories.
The tech support could not be better. I wanted an easy way to print slide labels onto Avery Return Address labels using the Slide Number (which for me is the filename), my copyright notice, and the caption using the IPTC data. I figured out an awkward way of doing it by exporting those 3 fields to a text file, then using Win Word's mail merge feature to create the labels. I emailed to Photools about this. Within the day, Mario Westphal, the programmer, emailed back with a script that automatically sets up a properly formatted Word file with the data from the selected images in about 2 seconds. And I'm not even a registered user yet! But after this I certainly will be.
I highly recommend IMatch as a tool for professional photographers or any serious amateur who wants to properly organize his images. It's a very powerful program with a lot of depth and is based on the IPTC standard. I would even put it a notch above Fotostation Pro, a much more expensive program. IMatch has a 30-day trial with a very reasonable registration fee of $49.95 U.S.
http://www.photools.com/
On your other question, the EXIF data is written by the camera. The IPTC data is written by the user and has fields for copyright, caption, location, date and many others. Very few image database programs are able to write IPTC data to the file, instead relying on an external database. Photoshop is able to write IPTC data, and you can set up batch commands to write the same information to whole folders at a time. This is a easier to do in IMatch or
Fotostation, however. You should also be aware that the EXIF data might be lost when you add IPTC data to the file (certainly this is the case with Photoshop).
I'm a pro photographer and a user. I have no other affiliation with Photools.
Scott Rowed, Canada (full
name used by permission. Thanks Scott - mw) |
| Thanks for an excellent product. I
have read the IMatch forum messages and the IMatch related messages in
dpreview.com and I have tried IMatch for 5 days and decided to
purchase the license.
Persio, Brasilia |
Wow,
IMatch could really be the one and only image management software I
ever need.
Kari L, Finland |
Simply excellent
Unknown user, in a public discussion forum |
Excellent tool! I've used thumbsplus
until now, but after seeing this, thumbsplus looks like a toy.
Marc, ranking IMatch on the winsite.com shareware
site |
I've
recently downloaded version 3 of the already known IMatch software.
Wow, man, this is what I call "serious programming" :)) Is a
GREAT piece of software; I'm seriously considering registering, and I
promise you I consider it for very few programs.
Javier G, Spain (user
actually registered his copy of IMatch - mw) |
| First of all let me tell you that what I have seen
so far of your program is absolutely great. I will definitely
buy it.
Tony G., United States (He
has - mw) |
To be honest, the only apps I've found that handle
everything are indeed thousands of dollars, and are not
necessarily very easy nor very useful. And I must say,
especially since I now know you did this on your own, that I am mighty
impressed with your skill and thoroughness. And I'll add that
your documentation is head & shoulders above most, even high-end
expensive stuff! Kudos to you for considering that the users are
not always as expert as the developers.
J. P. L, United States |
I have used your program Imatch now for almost one
week and I find it amazing...such a nice tool for all my pictures
(+20.000). The best I have seen was the speed of the database, and the
nice tools which you can do in Batch. I do know that I only found 40%
of your program and still has to discover a lot....
I have seen and used a lot of catalog tools for my pictures, but this
is certainly number one....
Auke L., Norway |
| Download - Try for two days - Register! Excellent
piece of software.
Nick J., United States |
| We've tried many of the well-known digital image
management systems here at our site, but after only a couple of days
we're totally convinced that IMatch is really the tool of choice for
professional photographers. Everything is where we need it, it's fast
and flexible.
Carmen P., Canada |
| The first application that is truly capable of
handling my 100,000+ images collection. Wow!
Peter McC., United States |
| This is a great tool. The manual is also excellent.
We have indexed our entire collection in only one week, and created
over 900 categories. We finally found out what the dynamic categories
stands for - the best thing we've ever seen in such a
application.
Javier K., France |
Have you anything to say about IMatch?
Please send your comments to mw@photools.com |
| |
