editing/viewing all keywords in the database

[timoteo]

Using imatch 2025.3.2 on Windows 11.

I want to see all keywords used in my database for all pictures but I can't find how to do this. I remember finally figuring it out in my old version but it was less than obvious to me. I don't understand why there isn't just a "keywords" with "Media & Folders", "Categories", "Timeline", etc. With my old version of imatch, I remember I had to do somehing which was not obvious. If I recall correctly, I selected my top-level directory ("Database") from the list of folders, then clicked on "Open Thesaurus". I've gotten that far and have my thesaurus manager open and can see all my keywords.

What I want to do is delete logical duplicates. e.g., show all images that have the keyword "churches" assigned, then assign "church" to all of them and delete the keyword "churches" from the keywords entirely. I have used both keywords over the years and want to merge them all into "church".

I can select the "churches" keyword but I cannot show (so far) all images assigned "churches" nor see how many images are assigned "churches". 

I'm confused. It's late and I'm tired, but this seems to be far more difficult than I imagined, or I am "barking up the wrong tree" here?

Please help.

[PandDLong]

You will find it under Categories.  The Keywords are at the top of the category tree.

I hope that helps.

Michael

[Mario]

See: The @Keywords Category

[timoteo]

I found it. The Categories panel was hidden so when I clicked on Categories, I just got a blank window.

[Mario]

Not sure that I follow.
The Categories View is never hidden. And the best way to solve your requirement. The Categories Panel is used for assigning files to categories.

[Tveloso]

The OP may have activated Auto Hide for the Categories View, and then forgot about it.

I actually use Auto Hide with all the Views (except of course Events, which has a little different design), in order to have more space for the File Window.  Auto Hide is a very nice feature.

[sinus]

The OP may have activated Auto Hide for the Categories View, and then forgot about it.

I actually use Auto Hide with all the Views (except of course Events, which has a little different design), in order to have more space for the File Window.  Auto Hide is a very nice feature.

But Auto Hide works only for Panels, like the File Categories Panel.
The Categories View cannot be hidden.

Or do I miss something

Edit: Yes, I guess, I am wrong. Forget this post (I wanted not to delete it), I am a bit irritated by the almost equal names.

[Stenis]

TIMOTEO: "What I want to do is delete logical duplicates. e.g., show all images that have the keyword "churches" assigned, then assign "church" to all of them and delete the keyword "churches" from the keywords entirely. I have used both keywords over the years and want to merge them all into "church"."

I had the same issue and opened the metadata panel and then opened the Thesarus. There we can import every keyword not in the Thesarus from the database - I get new ones produced by Autotagger. After that it is very easy to delete the ones you don't want to use - for example keywords in plural. Its OK for me. It is a none problem now for me.

In order not to get these duplicates it takes some prompting of Autotagger Keywords prompt at least in my case.

[Mario]

TIMOTEO: "What I want to do is delete logical duplicates. e.g., show all images that have the keyword "churches" assigned, then assign "church" to all of them and delete the keyword "churches" from the keywords entirely. I have used both keywords over the years and want to merge them all into "church"."

1. In the Category View, select the "churches" category below @Keywords.
2. Select all files with Ctrl+A
3. In the Keywords Panel, Ctrl+click "churches" to mark this keyword for deletion
4. Add keyword "church".
5. Ctrl+S to save changes.

You can add/remove any number of keywords for any number of files that way.

Or, maybe quicker in many situations,

1. In the Category View, select the "churches" category below @Keywords.
2. Select all files with Ctrl+A
3. Drag the files from "churches" to "church" and, while holding <Shift> release the mouse to move the files from keyword churches to church. If you don't hold<Shift>, the files are also assigned to the target category
Very quick to do in many cases.

See Using Drag and Drop

Both methods have the advantage that you don't have to fill (and possibly poison) your controlled vocabulary in the thesaurus from all the keywords found in the database. If this is what you want, OK. Else consider method 1 or 2 above.

[timoteo]

thanks, everyone! 

[Stenis]

The problem in the first place is that Autotagger without restrictions in the Keywords prompt will produce both "Church" and "Churches".

With proper restrictions that will not be much of a problem.

[Mario]

The problem in the first place is that Autotagger without restrictions in the Keywords prompt will produce both "Church" and "Churches".

AutoTagger does not produce any keywords, the AI model you use does.
Maybe include "Use only the singular form" or similar in your prompt so the AI understands what you want. Worth a try.
The modern models have large context windows and can handle large prompts. May cost a wee bit more, but if the results match better, you save manual labor.

[Stenis]

The problem in the first place is that Autotagger without restrictions in the Keywords prompt will produce both "Church" and "Churches".

AutoTagger does not produce any keywords, the AI model you use does.
Maybe include "Use only the singular form" or similar in your prompt so the AI understands what you want. Worth a try.
The modern models have large context windows and can handle large prompts. May cost a wee bit more, but if the results match better, you save manual labor.

I guess you got what I ment :-)

The core problem is that Autotagger using the AI-model you have chosed will produce a lot of keywords you might not want in your Thesarus IF we don't restrict it from doing so by prompting and configuration.

It is not just the singular-plural issue we also get long lists of keywords built on color like:

Red blinders, Blue blinders, grey blinders ... and there can be lots of combinations like that. That is why I have found it necessary to restrict my system only to use single word keywords.otherwise I get Flower, Flowers, Flower pot, Flower bed, Flower arangement and all sorts of combinations including Flower.

If we can't harnees a mess like that even the cathegorys will get useless because the targets will get spread out over too many different cathegories.

I guess most will end up matching the keyword generations by Autotagger  with a controlled vocabulary in the more or less static Thesarus.

[Mario]

That's why AutoTagger has the pretty unique and powerful keyword mapping feature, including thesaurus integration.
You won't find this in many other DAM software, if at all.

I gave users these tools to 'reel in' and streamline AI keywords if the prompt cannot do it.
Providing lists of expected keywords, like "Describe the vehicle shown in this image by picking the best match from this list: ["Automobile","Race Car", "Bicycle", "Motorbike", "Chopper", "Sail Boat", "Boat", "Yacht"] and similar constructs in prompts can often avoid later reprocessing. What works depends on the used model, of course.

[Jingo]

Helpful idea (hopefully):

I also restrict what I write back to my "main keywords" from my "AI keywords" through a metadata template that limits the keywords to ones that are hierarchical and already in my thesaurus.  I too did not want "flat" keywords messing up my tight hierarchical keyword list.

Thus, my AI keywords could include 15 items including the colors you mention... but my regular keywords only include the 6 that have a hierarchy from the top levels of my thesaurus that I care about (ie: Animals\).



Adding maps for new keywords that I do want to include helps out for future AI runs as Mario mentions - though I do wish we could have the type-ahead lookup into the Thesaurus to make this job easier (currently requires careful typing or copy/paste from an exported thesaurus list - feature request has been made and discussed).

Good Luck exploring AI capabilities.. they are quite an amazing advancement for IMatch!

[Stenis]

That's why AutoTagger has the pretty unique and powerful keyword mapping feature, including thesaurus integration.
You won't find this in many other DAM software, if at all.

I gave users these tools to 'reel in' and streamline AI keywords if the prompt cannot do it.
Providing lists of expected keywords, like "Describe the vehicle shown in this image by picking the best match from this list: ["Automobile","Race Car", "Bicycle", "Motorbike", "Chopper", "Sail Boat", "Boat", "Yacht"] and similar constructs in prompts can often avoid later reprocessing. What works depends on the used model, of course.

The possibilities to handle all these challenges in iMarch are as you say pretty unique. That is why many companies and organisations not using tools and possibilities present in iMatch often end up using standardized vocabularies despite the downsides of such an approach.

I have vittnessed some of these endless discussions over standard vocabularies in the cultural heritage sector in my country. That was more than 10 years ago and I think they still struggles with that.

That is why flexibility under control is so important. Even a vocabulary has to be able to adapt to the reality.

We just have to compare what we have in PhotoMechanic to the tools in iMatch to realize how much more sofiticated this is in iMatch than anything else out there and it is definitely needed to handle the automatic flow of keywords AI now is creating.

The possibilities we have in iMatch to handle the keywords effectively is definitely one of the most important sellingpoints there is for iMatch. Without them we would have had to subtract an increasing maintenance cost for the keywords from the gains we now get from the Autotagger AI-processes creating them.

[Mario]

Using a controlled vocabulary is usually a good thing and standard practice in many organizations. IMatch handles this via the thesaurus.

There are always exceptions, though - situations where a controlled vocabulary needs to grow or where a few "additional" keywords (not from the vocabulary) for an image make sense. Ultimately, it's about providing the right amount of information consistently.

In the past (a couple of years ago), most cloud-based AIs used a vocabulary of 1,000 standard classifiers (keywords) to annotate training datasets. These keywords were mostly available in English. imagga and Azure offered translations into multiple languages, essentially translating those original 1,000 classifiers.

Modern LLM AIs use a much broader variety of keywords and classifiers. However, my limited testing with 10,000 images across many topics shows the keywords are more or less consistent for a given motive and prompt.

Unless a user's photo motives vary significantly, the AI-returned keywords come from a finite set-smaller or larger, but still limited. If an IMatch user consistently maps keywords and updates their thesaurus while processing the first couple of hundred images with AI assistance, they can eventually cover about maybe 95% or more of all returned keywords.

This involves mapping as needed, blacklisting unwanted keywords, and integrating them into the controlled vocabulary in the IMatch thesaurus. Then it's mainly a matter of monitoring changes when motives shift substantially.

This level of detail is relevant only to a smaller segment of the IMatch user base-those who care about these details. This includes professionals, institutions, scientists, or organizations more than "casual shooters."

I'm fine with that.

If users simply run the AI and accept its headlines, descriptions, and keywords, they end up with an easier-to-organize image collection. They can find images more easily, and IMatch can group similar images by motive, mood, color scheme or other traits - all working out of the box.

For users who have to be more precise and consistent in tagging, keyword mapping and the IMatch thesaurus are there to help.

Experimenting with prompt engineering to encourage the AI to produce better-matching keywords is also worth exploring. The same applies to getting the AI to generate headlines and descriptions in the correct style and brevity.

We just have to compare what we have in PhotoMechanic to the tools in iMatch to realize how much more sofiticated this is in iMatch than anything else out there

That's well known among the IMatch user base.
You often don't know what you are missing unless you experience it. Users switching to IMatch from Lightroom or Photo Mechanic usually notice that a lot more is possible when you have a pro-grade DAM available.

My problem is that it has become really, really hard to "spread the word." I often hear from new users, "I wish I had known about IMatch for years," but I don't know how to make IMatch more well-known.

When I look at Google Ad recommendations to spend initially only $5,000 USD per month (!) on ads, I can only laugh.
Not even considering the fact that all DAM-related Google Ad keywords are super expensive to auction because many big DAM players from Adobe to Widen bid for them.

I usually write to 20 to 30 magazines, photography websites and YouTube channels when a new major IMatch release comes out or I add a substantially large new feature. I usually never hear back, and when I do, I get only the "Cost for Advertising on Our Site" PDF back.

They just don't deal with small ISPs; they only work with marketing agencies paid for by big companies.
Or I'm just to stupid, which is always a possibility. I'm a developer, not a marketing person.

So, Spread the Word, let others know about IMatch. You may do them a favor and help the project.

[Stenis]

Mario, I have written in a few communities and really explained what we can do now with iMatch, Autotagger and a good AI API now and a few are interested that are into building photo archives or just to get a better control over their assets but most of the photo communities are built around hard ware freaks and are on top of that not all that progressive. It is very strange that people prepared to spend fortunes on modern high-end cameras and not to talk about the super expensive lenses down to the smallest 0,1 step improvement of max aperture and on top of that very outspoken about their high demands of image quality are so uninterested in software that on the margin can add a lot more for that image quality than these super expensive lenses actually can not to talk about really effective DAM-software.

Strange too is that the same people using converters with pretty poor and technically rudimentary built in picture libraries (some call them DAM of some unclear reasons) that they never will use properly because they are so ineffective to use that most users give up in a short time adding metadata to the pictures also complains about paying the very resonable cost for iMatch.

You are talking about the problem to reach out to your presumptive customers and I guess that is the backside of software companies not selling through "the channel" (vendors-distributors-resellers) anymore as they were in the late nineties and beginning of this century. As a software company you are on your own now. You can sell direct to us without resellers and distributors and you don´t need to pay them anything but you will not be able to use the support of a "channel" and their sales staff either.

Well, I have decided to add a new illustrated story to the 40+ I already have written to my blog making what I have written earlier about iMatch and AI-powered population of the Description- and Keyword-elements of my image metadata, more accessible for my readers.

This week Nvideas manager Jensen Chang was in Sweden to visit a university here and starting up an AI joint venture with one of Swedens most important industrial group that owns SAAB and Ericsson among a lot of other important companies. What they are aiming at is to build infrastructure and momentum around the implementation of AI in their companies processes in order to empower them widely. I think we really need to put focus on this.

If you feel a little disappointed so far Mario, I think it might be because this is still to new for many and you and iMatch happen to be one of the first examples in both my and a few others lives where AI significantly already makes a huge difference. Most people like me first did not really believe that AI really was able to deliver Descriptions of a "good enough" quality and they certainly do not believe that the Description-text quality with the new AI-models already have passed the "good enough" stage with quite a lot. ... and as I already have written: especially among professional photographers and photo-entusiasts that often are very conservative there is a great reluctans to everything that smells the slightest AI. I think AI will gain interest in a much broader way soon when more people really can see what AI- APPLICATIONS really can do to improve workflows - not the least photo workflows. Far to long mostly the anticipated problems AI might cause or inflict has layed as a wet blanket over this case and this has paralysed especially the photo community.

I look at this is an 180 degrees different direction. Especially photographers really need to openly embrace the AI-support that for example in Capture One, in several pretty unique ways, has improved the efficiency in thier users workflows. The same goes for iMatch. When considering the process of adding Descriptions and Keywords to my pictures iMatch must have boosted my productivity more than 10 times. There is not many who will be fine paying the prices many inefficient photographers will be asking  for their pictures in a close future so everybody that want to stay relevant in this business has to embrace the tools that can improve their productivity. That´s why also iMatch pretty unique approach to digital asset management in the photo industry will make a difference.

Most photo businesses are small and even photographers are buried in administration of their businesses. So they often need to create order out of their file chaoses as well and one of imatches pretty unique selling points among photo oriented DAM-systems is that it can tie metadata not just to picture and video-files but also to textfiles like PDF-files and Office-documents. Not even the industry standard app PhotoMechanic fixes that.

[Jingo]

Great write-up and thx for sharing!  I think a big obstacle towards wider acceptance of IMatch is just the sheer number of folks that don't organize their photos. From my days reviewing DAM applications and talking with professional photographers, it still seems that most just do a minimum amount of tagging and rating - enough to find those "top shots" but not really going all the way to people tagging, event creation, full on descriptions for each image, etc. Not sure if it is a "time thing" or just something else... if they can find their images later on in their Lightroom catalog by date or a fast keyword/rating, that seems to be just enough for the majority.

The average person will still be using their phone for 90% of their photos.. and they never do more than share them on social media... 

So, IMatch is catering to a small subset of photographers and photo enthusiasts like ourselves... those that see the beauty in categorizing their media, and the fun and joy of organizing it all.

It's the old shoebox of images and negatives just in a digital generation... and I don't see things changing much until AI (and IMatch) gets so good, that upon ingest, all the work is done for us... and maybe a version that runs on Apple/Android comes along to do it all as well.

Good discussion though... spread the word indeed!

[Mario]

A primary reason for adding keywords (or using categories) and adding descriptions is to make an image collection searchable. "Find all images of Aunt Mary from last year" is impossible unless the metadata has been (automatically) added. Finding all images with a red car in Barcelona is impossible unless the keywords exist or the car and city is mentioned somewhere in other metadata.

If the data is there, IMatch's advanced tools like data-driven categories and @Keywords make automatically organizing even huge collections very easy and customizable.

If a person gets by with a typical YYYY|MM|DD folder structure and can use that to quickly find the images she/he needs, a DAM or cataloging system is not needed. Many get by with the few DAM features available in Lr or other RAW developers. Or they just stick to it because they won't to pay money for yet another software. Or the user has only 20,000 images and can find anything in a short while. All good reasons for not needing a DAM.

Phones automatically "organize" photos to some extent, maintain a timeline, do face recognition if you let them etc. Which is good enough for most people who just take photos for sharing or their blog.

Still, I believe the potential user base for IMatch is larger than it is now. It's just hard to reach them.

Virtually all DAM vendors now have "Best DAM systems <YEAR>" SEO articles out there, further deluding the usable information one can find on Google, with boilerplate SEO-optimized sludge they probably get all from the same two marketing/SEO companies. Hard to get heard over all this noise.

[Stenis]

Well, I used Lightroom since version 1.0 around 2005 or 2006 after Adobe made a hostile take-over and killed the then VERY successful Danish software RAW Shooter Essentials/Elite from Pixmantec, which they then saw as a real potential threat to their market position. I got Lightroom 1.0 for free and I hated it since it was really buggy. I used it some years despite I didn´t like the preview quality at all or the image quality with my Sony ARW RAW. I did my first attempts with XMP-metadata but it was so time consuming and ineffective that I gave up after a very short time and didn´t take it up before i stumpled over PhotoMechanic Plus 6, more than four years ago.

That´s why I see a much brighter future for iMatch than the rest because from what I have seen so far iMatch seems to be the only real fullgrown DAM-software for photographers with a reasonable price-tag built with a real "holistic" approoach to the engineering. Mario seems to have thought of and covered almost all there is to handle and providing really effective workflows on top of that.

It is really true there is a learning curve to consider with iMatch but it is not prohibitive in any means since the documentation is excellent and the support is even better and on top of that a helpful community. If there is any software with a solid potential to really scale up the effectiveness of these photo-workflows it is iMatch. With a little configuration and the impementation of a good AI API like Open AI or Google Gemini and also the support of some of the map API:s available (not just from Google!) to use in iMatch, we have everythinhg we need now with Open AI 4.1 or Google Gemini 2.0 Flash. If image quality is really important for the users nothing works better and scale better together with iMatch than DXO Photolab. It is even better than PhotoMechanic because PM is still lacking support for AI-automation, has far inferior support for thesaruses and structured keywords, lacks face detection and has a map function that really sucks compared to the one in iMatch.

People using face detection together with the AI-powered Autotagger will also experience how well that info is integrated in the Description texts.

I´m really truely surprised over how far Mario has been able to take us in such a short time. I just did not expect that iMatch 2025 was ready to solve both the Description quality and the efficiency problems. I have had such problems with using PhotoMechanic because the fully manual approach to both Descriptions and Keywords. There is a lot good to be said about PM Plus too but without a solution for the users not using tailor-made list for sports or events journalists using search and replace functions, PM has absolutely nothing to offer today to speed up these processes and that is why I have left it. Many other alternatives too has only been able to support AI-processes for the keywords but not for the Description-texts.

Who am I to write these verdicts? Well I was the combined developer and technical project leader of the implementation of a Fotoware corporate DAM (origianally started by Hasselblad in Gothenburg Sweden later settled in Oslo Norway) on the behalf of the City Museum of Stockholm in Sweden. I worked with the development of this software together with Fotoware to among other things add support even for PDF- and Office-documents that the software prior to that was lacking. I worked seven years with FotoWare DAM and got quite a lot of insights around problems the Cultural inheritance sector in Sweden had with the tasks of establishing a common standardized vocabulary.

I can tell you that a system like that costed then around 200 000 USD with the implementation. I can also say that compared to iMatch for maybe 130 USD it also lacked exaktly the same features PhotoMechanic is lacking still today compared to iMatch. So in my world iMatch is a true bargain compared to what we get for the money. It would surprice me if not many more users than I and you in a close future will be able to see that building a really useful and effective picture library/archive is an absolutely doable project with a little help of iMatch and the community here.

[Stenis]

Mario the problems with keywords is that they are close to useless on the Internet since they often are ordinary words common on the Internet and of that reason will drown in the Internet noise. On the contrary Headlines, Descriptions and even Location-metadata can be of great importance. Quite a few have found their way to my illustrated blogs through my XMP-metadata.

Over more than 50 years I have travelled so my pictures was originally organized in folder almost like sessions. Strictly "Country" + "Year". I did not plan that at all but when starting with PhotoMechanic I found that it was almost ideal. The dates, filenames were already there as the camera model of cameras used and lenses. No need for that in the folder texts. I just pointed at the topfolder when doing the initial indexing and after 45 min. or an hour I had my database.

As late as 2013 we had visitors from the unit in Stockholm that were responsible for building the roads in the City. They had one guy then that was their "system" and data sili manager and every "digging" they called it was stored in a folder market accordingly. It was a really vulnarable systemso they were ready for a DAM too.

At that time we were a reference site for Fotoware and got visitor from as far away as the Tsingua University in Beijing and we had dialoges even with Fotoware customers like Ford Foundation in the US that wanted to do what we had done. At that time we were the only site with a real DAM that supported even non-photo documents and even relied heavily on integrating the museums legacy SQL-databases with the DAM for datalookup and automation processes. Now everything of this is mainstream and Fotoware could expand their presence from just the newspapaers and printing houses to all sorts of organisations and companies.

Since iMatch already supports non-photographical data and also have an optional webbsolution I think you all the chanses in the world to turn even to smaller non-photobusinesses with problems to organize their chaotic data silos with both pictures and other kind of documents. Today Fotoware has a lot of customers all over the world both in government and local offices, companies and organisations and that saved them when a lot of the newspapapers died. I know some FotoWare DAM-users that have used PhotoMechanic for users "on the field" (instead of Fotowares own pretty overloaded local client) to gather data before dumping it onto the DAM. Imatch I think has an even better potential as such a frontend since it has its excellent AI -support PM Plus is lacking and you have your top noth keyword-system too and you have such a good adapability to ad support for almost every metadata element there is out there. One thing you might add (if it is nor already there is a possibility to define your own namepaces and business specific tags/elements.

Hope some ideas can be interesting for you for the future. So maybe you will have to try to look for customers not just among photo-oriented customers? It might be of interest for you and your potential customers to be able to add advanced AI-support to less advanced DAM-systems with your iMatch-system as a frontend.

[Mario]

Only a percentage of the IMatch user base participates in this community.
IMatch has users working with it in small libraries, hospitals, small museums, quite a number of beauty surgeons, research organizations, NGOs and, of course, small stock agencies, enthusiast and professional photographers. It's very versatile and adaptable.

I just found another "Best DAM" review (https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/tools/best-digital-asset-management-software-for-photographers/) which does not include IMatch - and I'm sure my product has the edge for several of the capabilities mentioned in that review. May also be pure AI slop, I dunno.

When I click on their "and tell us about any tools we missed" link, it goes straight to their "Sponsorship & Advertising" page. Probably one of the "Pay to get included" sites. The usual price range for sponsorships & ads for such sites is 5K$ and more - without any guarantees. Outside of my range.

[JohnZeman]

I just found another "Best DAM" review (https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/tools/best-digital-asset-management-software-for-photographers/) which does not include IMatch - and I'm sure my product has the edge for several of the capabilities mentioned in that review. May also be pure AI slop, I dunno.

This is odd.  Mario when I click on that link you posted I see IMatch is listed as #8 in their top 10 DAMs.

And when I click on that link it takes me to the photools web site.

[thrinn]

That's right, John. IMatch is indeed listed as #8 (you have to expand the list). Not spelled correctly (with a lower-case i), but at least it is there.

[Mario]

There you have it! Now I'm stupid and cannot read anymore.

Of course, the text is partially nonsense, for instance "It's the best cross-platform DAM because it enables users to manage assets across different platforms and file systems.". IMatch is Windows only.
And they are using a name Apple probably has a trademark for. Sigh.

[PandDLong]

Only a percentage of the IMatch user base participates in this community.
IMatch has users working with it in small libraries, hospitals, small museums, quite a number of beauty surgeons, research organizations, NGOs and, of course, small stock agencies, enthusiast and professional photographers. It's very versatile and adaptable.

I consider myself a "family archivist" - I collect and organize family photos, videos, documents, stories, etc.  Ultimately, everything makes it into a digital form - physical artifacts (eg. artworks and documents) are photographed or scanned.

IMatch is a great tool for this purpose. I first purchased it to organize my personal "hobbyist" photos, but the capability of IMatch has greatly expanded the scope into areas that were of interest to organize but I had no idea how to do it until I started using IMatch.  Exporting with metadata text overlays using the Batch Processor significantly increases the value of the tool - and my hobby - as I easily share with extended family.

It seems that most products out there are just focused on photo management and limit the accessible metadata accordingly. IMatch's media independence and full gamut of metadata read/write access are a game changer - IMO.
   

Not sure how one taps into the market of people documenting their family history/genealogy but it is a niche market for which IMatch is perfect. I doubt many people in that hobby think of it as "digital asset management" and would not search for that term.  I have mentioned it in a couple of comments on popular blogs for this area and the response is "never heard of it" but then the blogger goes right back to evaluating photo-centric tools...

No solutions, just more ideas.

Michael

[Stenis]

I think a big obstacle towards wider acceptance of IMatch is just the sheer number of folks that don't organize their photos. From my days reviewing DAM applications and talking with professional photographers, it still seems that most just do a minimum amount of tagging and rating - enough to find those "top shots" but not really going all the way to people tagging, event creation, full on descriptions for each image, etc. Not sure if it is a "time thing" or just something else... if they can find their images later on in their Lightroom catalog by date or a fast keyword/rating, that seems to be just enough for the majority..........


........So, IMatch is catering to a small subset of photographers and photo enthusiasts like ourselves... those that see the beauty in categorizing their media, and the fun and joy of organizing it all.

I´m sure one of the main reasons is that the ones using more serious interchangeable lens cameras is an aging and pretty rapidly vanishing group of users and the group that postprocess their pictures and at least are using the built in Picture library-softwares of their RAW-converters is even smaller.

It is just a few months since I got back from a trip to Morocco and not even the photographers visiting the spectacular life in Essaouria fishing harbor had brought anything else than mobiles. I was there a hole day during the morning and later a second session in the afternoon and I saw no one else carrying a DSLR or mirrorless camera than me. Not even in a museum like Maison de Photographie de Marrakesh, full of tourists, there were mora than a few real cameras to see.

There are quite a few users using all sorts of viewers like Fast stone, XnView or whatever today to organise and wiev their pictures and some in that group might even be interested in scaling up to a real DAM-systems like iMatch if they were aware of the benefits. Otherwise I think the real potential to growth for iMatch will be outside the photosoftware market in smaller business and as a powerful "AI-powered frontend" to bigger corporate DAM-systems.

[Stenis]

Only a percentage of the IMatch user base participates in this community.
IMatch has users working with it in small libraries, hospitals, small museums, quite a number of beauty surgeons, research organizations, NGOs and, of course, small stock agencies, enthusiast and professional photographers. It's very versatile and adaptable.

That´s good!


A question:

Do you have a resent more ambitious and deeper promoting video where all the major selling points of iMatch we have touched here gets presented in depths?

When I searched with "iMatch Asset Management" on Youtube I got overviews 7 and 3 years old at the top.

When I tried with "iMatch 2025" I didn´t get anything relevant at all!!
And when I have searched before I gave up quickly because thera was nothing to se or view.
How come??

Isn´t something really wrong here??

By gones are by gones Mario and I think you really have to make an effort to spread the word that there is a real breakthrough now  with the new AI-models from Open AI and Google especially (Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash Lite  and Open AI GPT 4.1 and 4.1 Mini) that are true game changers compared to earlier models and that have empowered Autotagger to a whole new level that really makes a practical difference. It is so much faster and more effective on top of the increased quality the new AI-models gives to the texts it generates. I also think you shall actively target old PhotoMechanic users that might find it as interesting as I have done to solve the problems PM Plus still have with maintaining Descriptions and Keywords effectively. Many of them out to find there is quite a lot to gain by upgrading to iMatch.

I guess you will have no problem to verify my search results.
Just try for yourselves.

When comparing I can see Youtube is full of people demonstrating and promoting Topaz AI 3 or 4. The people at Capture One are very active too on Youtube. Maybe time for a serious selling point oriented video Mario.

[Stenis]

.... and you are the expert on metadata so I have hard to see why you should not be able to add the proper metadata that makes your videos float up all the way to the surface when people will search for iMatch 2025 or iMatch and AI.I know this works because I have used it for five years now to get through to a houndred thousand of readers of my own 40+ illustrated blog stories.

Its just about metadata.

[Mario]

It's just a matter of time. I do all of this in my spare time. I cannot produce an endless stream of videos on YT, write blog entries every other day, provide support to you here in the community, provide support via email, search and fix bugs and develop new features.

My web site is up-to-date. The overview video on YouTube is still valid. When I have the time, I will spend a couple of days to produce a new one.

Every IMatch user can make IMatch videos and upload them to YT. Or write about IMatch in blog posts or communities. That was my hope years ago, which I've had to bury, unfortunately.

Many of the videos you cite are probably "sponsored" content, paid for by companies with much deeper pockets than I have.
Adobe alone spends over 200 million dollars on marketing, video promotions, endorsers per year...

[Stenis]

Not all of them can be sponsored by just the fact that some are really critical especially on the Topaz Photo AI 4's  really expensive and slow cloud services that doesn´t even do the job to satisfaction often.

I guess Adobe have a pretty severe "image" problem these days so that might explain those figures :-).

[Mario]

I guess Adobe have a pretty severe "image" problem these days so that might explain those figures :-).

They don't care. Since introducing the subscription model, their revenues have tripled.

[Stenis]

True and with a subscription-model you don't need to care all that much about R&D either, because the money keeps pouring in any way. There are exceptions to that rule but it must be a hell of a temptation just to optimize and maximize revenues.

[Mario]

It is often discussed than the pace of innovation has slowed down for many companies offering subscriptions.
No real need to innovate much when users have to pay subscriptions anyway, or their software just stops working.
Constant and reliable revenue flow etc. Saas everywhere.

When I spend 12 to 18 months working on the "next" IMatch release, I can only hope that I sell enough updates to finance the hardware, software, licenses etc. I need to continue development. And to pay for the servers running this community, my website, the customer portal / update dispenser, the emails I sent to customers with upgrade notifications.
And of course for the lifetime I spend on support via email and this community.

SaaS is very attractive, from a developers standpoint. But people often hate it, and you need the cloud(t) of companies like Adobe or Microsoft to press people into subscriptions. For me, as a small ISV, this is not possible. FastSpring supports subscriptions and I could offer them. But this would just not fly.

[Stenis]

I have supported DXO (Optics Pro/Photolab) many years despite I'm not at all happy over the last years poor development of the software. I just don't want it to die. I will do that with iMatch too.

One thing to motivate people to upgrade is to do like many others - just give support to versions "supported" and set limits when support is discontinued and communicate that. Personally I think that is very reasonable.

By the way: Thanks for the support I have got the last three months. Very helpful. Despite the very good documentation for iMatch in general it sometimes helps and saves a lot of time getting some help from you or this often very skilled and helpful iMatch user community :-)

[Mario]

One thing to motivate people to upgrade is to do like many others - just give support to versions "supported" and set limits when support is discontinued and communicate that. Personally I think that is very reasonable.

I do that for many years. See point 4. End of Support here https://www.photools.com/shop/
Support ends six months after the release of the next major upgrade. For IMatch 2023, support ends in August 2025.
Users can of course still ask questions here in the community, but my email support will be severely limited.

For the majority of IMatch users, my software "just works". There is often some onboarding effort (as in your case), but when users have found their way around in IMatch, things just work.

Maybe some issues with crappy metadata later on. Or issues when experimenting with a before not used or newly introduced feature. All normal, thankfully. 

By the way: Thanks for the support I have got the last three months. Very helpful. Despite the very good documentation for iMatch in general it sometimes helps and saves a lot of time getting some help from you or this often very skilled and helpful iMatch user community :-)

You're welcome. This community is indeed friendly, supportive and knowledgeable. Users are sometimes surprised that they know more about certain IMatch features than I do   

[Stenis]

I have supported DXO (Optics Pro/Photolab) many years despite I'm not at all happy over the last years poor development of the software. I just don't want it to die. I will do that with iMatch too.

One thing to motivate people to upgrade is to do like many others - just give support to versions "supported" and set limits when support is discontinued and communicate that. Personally I think that is very reasonable.

By the way: Thanks for the support I have got the last three months. Very helpful. Despite the very good documentation for iMatch in general it sometimes helps and saves a lot of time getting som help from you or a this often very skilled and helpful community :-)