Extensis Portfolio 7 for Win/Mac review:4 stars (Powerful, not for casual users) - Like PhotoShop, Porfolio is rich and deep. It rewards patient, attentive souls who study and learn. Portfolio 4 was a Godsend for me eight years ago. With it, I was able to efficiently organize thousands of images and produce a complex CD-ROM project. Since then I have used versions 5, 6, and now 7. All have been very useful.
Catalogs are a great feature of Portfolio. You can create multiple catalogs from the same database: one for this book, one for that report, one for this chapter, and another for that chapter. A single image can appear in one catalog or in many catalogs. You can drag an image out of a catalog and drop it in a report. All the while you have just one picture stored in one database. Not that long ago, for Windows users, there was nothing like Portfolio. Now Windows Explorer displays thumbnails, filmstrips, and EXIF data. Programs bundled with digital cameras, like Canon's Zoombrowser, are very easy to use, not to mention Google's Picassa. If one those is working for you, stay with it. However, if you have multiple publishing projects that require searching or scanning thousands of images, and if you use programs like Adobe InDesign to publish them, then you may find Porfolio indispensible. 2 stars (Endless headaches) - I've been trying to use Portfolio 7 for three months now to catalogue 3000 photos and create an online catalog. This product was recommended as the best application for what I wanted to do. I've used computers on a professional level for 12 years-I'm no greenhorn. Portfolio 7 has been a continuous nightmare. The manual is inadequate and incomplete. Tech Support was at first a 40 minute long distance hold and then friendly-but unhelpful-tech support. Then they wouldn't answer the phone at all. With e-mail support you'll get a get message acknowledging your query and then - nothing - Any useful tech support I received was from third parties.
Little and undocumented things like not clicking an obscure box buried deep in the menus would tie up my computer for hours busily creating catalogues that didn't exist or immediately crashed. Nothing about this was in the manual. I worked with an experienced Network Engineer and even he couldn't over come the endless pitfalls. Hours and hours wasted. One problem, I installed version 7.0.4 from the Extensis site purchased the CD from which we installed the server parts v7.0.0. They were completely incompatible. The read me documentation on the CD says that the CD contains version 1.2 . ???? And of course no where is there any indication that a minor version difference is a serious incompatibility problem. At best this is beta software masquerading as usable. Its not. I'm stuck with it-I hope you won't be.
