As digital files emerge as our primary source of media, long-term preservation and management of digital media is increasingly important.
With the rapid growth of digital media, both in personal and professional use, there is an ever-growing need for quick and easy ways of
searching across several hundred or thousands of media files. iView MediaPro makes this easy.
It is almost impossible to retrieve images from a large collection of digital media without the help of metadata (shown below).
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Location: Mykonos
Country: Greece
Event: Resort shoot
Event Date: 7/24/2005
Keywords:
aqua, pool, overflowing, tranquil, relax
Sets: resorts, Greek Islands
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MediaPro focuses on efficient ways to categorize and retrieve media and to make sense of the various
available options.
Features such
as: drag-and-drop annotation, classification
and labeling across one or many media items; instant single-click
searching; quick catalog index summaries
that do not require you to remember the exact spelling
or syntax of what you are looking for are all included in MediaPro to organize photos and other digital files.
The emphasis is on speed, ease and versatility of viewing and annotating,
allowing you to spend your time evaluating and categorizing your
media in a meaningful way, rather than on setting up application
dialogs or configuring complex searches.
Annotations
Annotations (also known as metadata) refer to text that describe
properties or contents of pictures, movies, or any other media file.
Some annotation fields, such as properties, format, size, duration,
or camera settings (EXIF), are extracted automatically by
MediaPro from the media file. These annotations are non-editable.
Editable annotations
such as Author, Location, Event, etc.
enable you to add content specific information to your media.
iView MediaPro offers five types of editable annotations:
Standard annotation fields offer a wide range
of information that can describe any media file. These fields
are mapped to industry standard IPTC/XMP Core annotations and can be embedded
in the original media files. Writing these annotations to
the original files ensures that they are accessible by any application
that supports the standard.
MediaPro offers the deepest IPTC/XMP support among all popular
cataloging applications, including new fields such as Event
(Fixture), Location, Status and People (Contact).
Custom annotations such as Price, Age,
etc. allow a certain amount of flexibility and customization shared
across iView catalogs. These fields cannot be written to the original files, but, as with standard
IPTC fields, they can be incorporated into workflows and exported to other applications such as databases or spreadsheets, via scripts.
Color labels offer instant visual identification
of selected images among thousands of media files. Labels help
you to shortlist a catalog and jump to selected images. Just pick
your images and press any
number key on your keyboard to label your selection.
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Sets are suitable for organizing
related media (such as graphics related to a project,
or images taken on trips). Sets are more powerful than
annotation fields as they can be arranged in
hierarchies and are completely flexible in what they
contain.
Sets are similar to folders, but will let you organize
a catalog in any
way you want without changing your folder organization.
This example (left) depicts a sporting event, where images
from the event can be placed in any meaningful set
or subset. For example, images related to the France-Senegal
game can be instantly located under set "Group
Stage:A".
In addition, the same images can be located under the "National
Teams:France"
set, as well as the event Venue set, without file
duplication.
The contents of sets can be edited with simple drag-and-drop
and can be viewed by clicking on the set name.
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Annotation panels
In iView MediaPro there are two panels where you can
view, edit and assign annotations to your media files.
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The Info Panel provides an instant look at the aggregate
properties and annotations of a media file. You can edit and check the
accuracy of information, within a single user-configurable
list with no need to remember to open multiple dialogs.
Along with extended IPTC support, MediaPro allows you to batch edit annotations for multiple
media files, giving you complete control of
the editing process.
Provides features for creating multiple AutoFill presets
relative to specific projects or recipients of your
media files. You use AutoFill to automatically assign
entries to one or more annotation fields.
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In contrast to the Info Panel, the Organize Panel
is more suitable for global searches or groupings, allowing a
quick comparison across hundreds of files, often revealing
annotation inconsistencies among a large number of files. By viewing your
media on a global rather than individual perspective, you
ensure the standardization and accuracy of your annotations
across your media.
The Organize Panel lists all annotations or tags present
in the catalog. By batch (or individual) dragging media over
the existing data values, you can assign these values to the
multiple media items. This increases and simplifies the annotation process.

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The Organize Panel can be
configured to provide field summaries from a variety
of fields, including Location, Date, People, Author, etc.
Field summaries are superior to simple Find
searches as they eliminate the need to remember the
exact spelling or syntax of the search criteria.
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Instant catalog-wide searching
Catalog-wide searching can be performed quickly and directly
from the toolbar search box. You can search for text
on any type of information attached to your media items, or search
for labelled items among the items of your media catalog.

The traditional Find dialog offers complete
flexibility. Searches can be done within the current catalog,
open catalogs, recent catalogs, or across all catalogs in a folder.
Searching is case-insensitive and includes IPTC and
media properties. As well, searches can be saved for
quick, repeat access.

Catalog Finder
iView MediaPro offers the Catalog Finder which
allows you to quickly locate and preview all iView catalogs on
a storage volume (hard drive, CD, DVD, removable media etc.)
You can open a catalog directly from the Catalog Finder.