Keywording and Captioning

The keywording concept has proven to be useful but limited. In practice, it is often much more convenient to create a hierarchical structure that is optimal to emphasize relations between images or to order images based on projects, clients or themes.

The unique Dynamic Category concept in IMatch combines the proven schema of keywords with a flexible hierarchical structure that fully supports automatic parent-child relationships.

This concept also allows you to combine categories using the Boolean operations AND, OR and NOT to form even more powerful relations between images in your database.

Physical and Logical View

IMatch differentiates between a physical view and a logical view on your images. The physical view represents images as they are stored on your disk drives and Windows folders. The virtual view, represented by dynamic categories, allows you to arrange your images independent from their actual storage location on your system or network.

The logical view serves as a virtual image space for your images. By simply creating categories and dragging your images onto one of these categories, you move the image from the real (physical) world into a much more powerful and easy virtual world.

Here you can think in terms like motive, theme, client, project, model, country, or anything else you can imagine. IMatch internally automatically keeps track of all the dirty housekeeping, you can concentrate on the optimal structure for your virtual image space.

Albums

Dynamic Categories can be used as "Albums" or "Galleries". By creating top-level categories, you can create a high-level order for your image collection. You can then refine this by adding sub-categories as you wish.

Keywords

IMatch categories can also be similar to keywords in other applications. Instead of adding keywords to an image, you add the image to one or more categories. Instead of "searching" for files having specific keywords, you just click on the categories to see the assigned images.

Drag and Drop Assignments

In IMatch, you assign images to categories either via specialized dialog boxes, or by just dragging one or more images to a category.

Visibility and Control

At any time you can see all images in your database via the special @All category, and all images not yet assigned to a category via the special @Unassigned category.

No Limits

IMatch categories can contain virtually any number of images. You can assign images to any number of categories at once. There is also no limit for the number of categories you create, or how "deep" your category hierarchy goes.

Building Hierarchical Relations

In the real world, images tend to fall into multiple categories. For example, an image showing a group of persons on the beach may be assigned to categories like "Beach", "Persons", "Female", "Male" and to themes like "Leisure", "Fun", "Recreation", "Holidays", "Swimming" etc.
If the image also shows a car, you may want to denote that by assigning the image into the category "Cars" also.

In the figure above, the category "Swimming" is highlighted. IMatch displays all images that are assigned to this category in the thumbnail viewer on the right (not shown).

As you can see, the category "Swimming" is a child category of the category "Sport". If you would highlight the category "Sport", IMatch would also show the images that are assigned to one of the categories "Biking", "Rafting", or "Running". A parent category virtually contains all images from it's child categories. This way, categories in IMatch automatically form a hierarchical structure on top of your image collection.

Hierarchies for Clients and Projects

If you are a professional photographer, you may use dynamic categories to model customers, clients and projects. Such a hierarchy can be used together with your content of appearance hierarchy at the same time.

Combining Categories with Boolean Operations

Imagine you want to see all images that contains persons at the beach. You already have assigned your images to one of the categories "People" or "Beach".

So, what would be easier to say, that the category "People at the beach" contains all images that are in the category "People" and that are also in the category "Beach"?

The figure above shows how this is done in IMatch. By opening the properties dialog box for a category, you can assign a category formula to that category. In the expression field, you simply type your formula or use one of the built-in selectors to make your choice.

Whenever you select the category "People at the beach", IMatch will display the results of the combination of the two categories "Beach" and "People". Of course, the result is immediate, even if the categories contain thousands of images.