We're in process of rolling out Artesia TEAMS, which is a high-end digital asset management system. It's probably beyond the resources for most small institutions.
I wonder, what functionality are you looking for? There is a huge variety in terms of products that tend to get lumped together under the image/gallery/asset management umbrella. Some focus on workflow - managing a creative environment. Some are archive/preservation oriented, while others focus on the living repository. Do you expect to publish direct from the system to a Website, or to provide a portal into the system, for casual visitors and researchers? Or will it be strictly internal? Do you want it to provide workflow, repurposing (file format conversion, etc), and other advanced functionality, or are you mainly looking for a system to store images and associate metadata with them? For individuals and small workgroups I often recommend iView Media Pro; in the same class I still recommend Extensis Portfolio, which is capable of scaling up a bit higher (there's a server option, for instance). I don't particularly like Canto Cumulus anymore. I agree that Photoshop CS File Browser - and actually the VersionCue server software also from Adobe - can be quite powerful, and it's at least a natural environment for many folks involved in imaging - you can create custom metadata models and custom UIs within Photoshop for capturing the fields you want... data is stored in XML so it's easy to integrate... but I don't typically recommend this as it takes a bit of sophistication to implement it well (but it can be a GREAT frontend for another system). If you want strictly a Web gallery management tool there are literally hundreds of free PHP/MySQL based systems. Google for "PHP image gallery".. MediaBeacon is nice and fairly easy to use and to plop on top of an existing set of files. Far more advanced are tools from Artesia, MediaBin/Interwoven. NetXPosure has some interesting products, both at the high end and quite a bit cheaper - their low-end product looks very nice. Some more details on what you'd expect from this system would help me give you a specific recommendation. Best, Roger Howard Digital Media Specialist The J. Paul Getty Trust --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
