IMatch Anywhere

[MichaelR]

Hi,

We would like to place our images in IMatch and make them available for viewing over the web with IMatch Anywhere for certain partners. The access will be password protected. We have about 1 million images and I thought to place the photos in 4 databases, not to leave IMatch comfort zone. My question is how to use IMatch Anywhere when a partner logs in. Do they need 4 logins for 4 databases? Is this an option?

Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

Friendly greetings,

Michael

[Mario]

An IMatch database can manage virtually any number of images.
Naturally, the more files are added, the slower certain operations become (for example, searching, data-driven categories etc.). More files means simply more work to do...
500,000 files per database is absolutely workable on modern hardware. 1 million files is quite a lot, but I know that clients out there run IMatch with that many files successfully. Especially with IMatch WebServices, which do a lot 'less' with the database than the IMatch desktop application.

One instance of IMatch WebServices™ can publish one database.
Publishing multiple databases t the same time requires to run multiple instances of IMWS on the the same or different computers.
Each instance (aka database) then can be reached with a different URL and/or port number. If you plan to use IMatch Anywhere WebViewer, your users just use different URLs to access different 'collections' (aka IMWS instances). Where these databases run is irrelevant for them.

You can make this more comfortable by setting up a front-end web site which presents the databases to choose from, with links to each of your published databases.


Notes

+ Running multiple instances of IMWS on the same computer you need at least the TEAM edition.
+ It also requires additional maintenance, because you have to setup and configure multiple instances of IMWS in separate folders, with separate configuration files. Doable, but you need to manually copy the executables after each update to keep your multiple instances in synch.

+ Running IMWS on multiple computers (containers, virtual machines) is easier and more performant. Note that IMatch Anywhere is licensed per computer/machine/container.

Security Notice

IMatch Anywhere WebServices is not a hardened web server like Apache or IIS.
It is highly recommended (see also the corresponding section in the IMatch Anywhere Help) to use a reverse proxy server facing the Internet for additional security and protection (plus firewall). This proxy server routes the requests to the IMWS computer running in your DMZ.

If you think these concepts are too complicated: 

IMatch Anywhere is a powerful and very reasonably priced DAM solution.
It does not have all the features of enterprise DAM software from companies like Canto, FotoWare, Extensis, AssetBank or Widen. And publishing one million files over the Internet is definitely corporate-grade.

IMatch Anywhere starts at only 45 US$ for a perpetual HOME license or 400 for a perpetual TEAM license.
The other systems mentioned above start at several thousand US$ per year (+ maintenance + hardware), or about 50 dollars per user per month, for cloud-based solutions. Plus monthly storage fees, which will be quite a lot for 1 million files.

[MichaelR]

Thanks for clarifying.