Imatch Vs Photo Mechanic Plus

[nwboater]

I use DXO PhotoLab for an editor. There is a very outspoken professional photographer on their Forum who is a long time user of Photo Mechanic and has converted to their new Plus Version that includes a DAM. He has been pushing it as the only DAM that's worth a damn!

Today he made this statement: ".....would I agree that the catalogue portion (not the metadata editor) is worth $400?  Astonishingly enough, yes. There's nothing else which will index whole hard drives worth of historic images and render them instantly searchable without delay and with unlimited filtering." 

Is that an accurate statement? I doubt it's true but would like some expert opinion. I want to reply on the DXO Forum if it's not accurate, but at this point I don't know enough to write an intelligent  post.

If anyone want to see the post it's by User 'uncoy' in this thread: https://feedback.dxo.com/t/pl5-keywords-one-step-closer-many-steps-still-to-go/21713/82  Unfortunately they don't use Thread counts, but you will find the post under today.

Thanks,
Rod

[Mario]

Astonishingly enough, yes. There's nothing else which will index whole hard drives worth of historic images and render them instantly searchable without delay and with unlimited filtering." 

Honestly, if somebody makes ultimate statements like this (about any software, service or product) I always wonder how many other products he/she has worked with.
Do they really know their stuff and can tell why product X is better than products A, B, C, ...? How many products did they work with? What features did they test?

I can tell when I used products A, B, C and X, which of these I like best. Based on my personal preferences, needs, my workflow and budget.
I cannot judge products D, E and F when I have never used them, right?

I mean, when you look at the rather comprehensive list of DAM products at Capterra (no affiliation): https://www.capterra.com/digital-asset-management-software/
The list over 400 DAM systems. Systems costing from 100 US$ to 200,000 US$ (per year).
Does that person know them all?
Or has he/she worked with at least a dozen of these DAM systems for some months to know enough to judge all the others?

As I always say in other communities and forums: "Whatever works for you is good".
IMatch works very well for many, but it does not work for everybody. Not all people need the extensive feature set of IMatch.
Many people only need very little DAM or, often, basically some simple cataloging program.

"Indexing whole hard drives worth of historic images and render them instantly searchable without delay" is something most DAM software considers as a basic must-have feature.
Nothing special or mind-breaking about that.

[nwboater]

Thanks Mario for the prompt answer! Do you mind if I quote your last paragraph? Also do you mind if I put a link to this thread in my post at DXO Forum?

I really don't want to get in a big row there over this, but I fear that he may be convincing people that Photo Mechanic is the ONLY one to use. We know that there are more fish in the stream!

Cheers,
Rod

[Mario]

I don't participate in "My software is better than your software" discussions.
Every user has different demands, preferences, experiences and workflow. What works best for one user may not work at all for another user.
I've learnt a lot from the IMatch user base in this regard over the years.

Photo Mechanic aims at the professional photo journalist market, with their tight deadlines, standardized metadata input requirements etc.
If they now include DAM functionality, good for them. I have not tried it so I cannot comment on it.
I might try it, at some time (but they demand an email address before you can download the trial, which always puts me off a bit).

If you look at platforms like Amazon's dpreview.com, you'll find many (even heated) discussions about what camera/lens/image editor/raw processor/DAM product is best.
Often with ultimate statements like "Software X is the best!". Which are of course to be taken with a big fat grain of salt 

[mopperle]

I can only second what Mario says. This is the same stupid discussion as between Canon and Nikon fanboys. You are making a good picture not the camera. And you have to get a DAM tool that fits to you and your needs. It might be a simply file management or something more demanding like IMatch or others. But there will always be people praying the ultimate tool and there will always be people listening to them.

I remember a well known german photographer using an analog Leica for many years until thieves broke into his house and steal all his equipment. He then moved to the digital world to a certain brand. In one of his presentations he told the audience this story and named the brand he were now using. Guess how many people after that went out buying a camera of this brand. 

[Mario]

I remember a well known german photographer using an analog Leica for many years until thieves broke into his house and steal all his equipment. He then moved to the digital world to a certain brand. In one of his presentations he told the audience this story and named the brand he were now using. Guess how many people after that went out buying a camera of this brand. 

This is why Adobe, camera vendors and others spend so much money on endorsers / ambassadors / influencers. If a prominent person endorses your products, this will generate a lot more sales.
Finding the best product for your purpose can cause a lot of work (installing and testing multiple applications, spending a week or more with each...).
Many people prefer to just follow the lead of somebody else, hoping that she/he is right when she/he recommends a product 

I frequently read reports in photography communities from people who switched from Lightroom to another RAW developer and are surprised that they get better results, and quicker.
Which says a lot about the 200 million US$ per year Adobe marketing budget...

[mopperle]

I frequently read reports in photography communities from people who switched from Lightroom to another RAW developer and are surprised that they get better results, and quicker.
Which says a lot about the 200 million US$ per year Adobe marketing budget...

Using Lightroom (coming from the old Rawshooter which was aquired by Adobe) and will stick to it. When Adobe introduced its subscription model, I tested out others and recently very intensively DxO PL, which is nice, but isnt so much better then many people think or believe and it would brake many of my other workflows.
The latest test was a high quality printout (A2 format) of a DeepSky picture I developed in LRC and PL. And there was zero visible difference. But as long people think they have to use a zoom factor of 400% to check sharpness and noise.....

[nwboater]

Thanks Mario & mopperle. I agree with what you have both said. It just bothers me to see such blatant misinformation as PM is the ONLY ONE to do blah, blah, blah. It's a little like saying DXO is the ONLY Raw Developer. That's a magnitude worse than saying it's the best. BTW he is a sports photo journalist.

So I won't reference this thread or quote you Mario. I may ask him though if he knows for a fact that Imatch and Photo Supreme can't do what he said PM is the only one that can  (My quote of him in my first post). I have good reason for doing this since I plan to buy Imatch when my new PC arrives next month and stop using Photo Supreme.

Cheers, Rod

[rienvanham]

For those who want to index the content (and search for it) in realtime take a look at Everything 1.5. It is still in development but works very well allready. It finds 1000's of files with the blink of an eye. I'm using it besides iMatch (because iMatch can't search in the content).

[JLGF1]

(because iMatch can't search in the content)

Could you please possibly clarify/contrast the differences in that statement?  Thanks.

[Mario]

(because iMatch can't search in the content)

Could you please possibly clarify/contrast the differences in that statement?  Thanks.

I guess he means that IMatch does no OCR and does not search the text content of PDF files.
This was never a requirement and IMatch searches PDF metadata, produces thumbnails and updates XMP data in PDF files just fine.

[rienvanham]

iMatch is PERFECT for most of my jobs (e.g. doing all the meta-stuff etc). But what iMatch can't (and that's by design) is indexing/searching the text in Word-files, Excel-files, PDF's. I have more then 100.000 PDF's (mails and other documents (which are OCR'd with FineReader)) and have to search often in these documents. Until for short I was using Copernic Desktop Search but, as with Adobe, I don't like the subscription model. I'm not againt paying for software but the most irritant is that, if you stop the subscruption, you can't use the software anymore. I was suprised about Everything 1.5, it is free and it's capable of indexing all my files with a text-layer. I would certainly pay for this software if needed.

It would be fantastic if iMatch could also index all these files but I'm aware that iMatch isn't designed for this. So I'm happy with using the 2 pieces of software concurrently.

(sorry if my English is a little bit poor: I'm Dutch).

[lbo]

It would be fantastic if iMatch could also index all these files but I'm aware that iMatch isn't designed for this. So I'm happy with using the 2 pieces of software concurrently.

Even Windows Search does search for indexed content, although it's UI has been crippled by Microsoft since 19H2 (for example no more instant results and syntax highlight). Try to type "search-ms:" in the address bar of an explorer windows (that's what Win-F did until Win 7).

"Everything" can use the Windows Search Index, just providing a better UI than the crippled Explorer

So why do you want IMatch to do the search instad?

[rienvanham]

I'm using iMatch as my DAM. It finds all pictures with a blink of an eye but it can't find (PDF)documents with a piece of text in the textlayer.
Everywhere (at least 1.5) uses it's own database and is superfast. Every document you add to your system is indexed instantly. The querylanguage is impressive.

Again: I'm happy with my solution. It could be more convenient if iMatch could index the content but I can live with how it is.

[Mario]

Feel free to add a feature request in the feature request board.

The 3rd party PDF libraries which can index text in PDF files and have licenses to allow their use in commercial applications (like IMatch) are not cheap and require annual royalties. If OCR is needed to extract text, this adds cost on top.

If not averse to adding additional searchable metadata like PDF document content indexing when there is a sufficient number of users who want this. Or who would be willing to pay for an IMatch add-on for this purpose.
Doing full-text indexing will require some substantial changes to the IMatch database (in order to do the indexing, store the extracted words, deal with language-specific stemming lists which can get messy etc.

As fair as I know, not that many users work with PDF or Office documents in IMatch.
It's great to have project PDFs, documentation etc. managed alongside the images or video files. But in that case, full-text indexing is rarely needed, by what I know.
IMatch manages and makes searchable many PDF metadata tags, author, title, timestamps, keywords, copyright info etc. It just does not do text extraction or full-text indexing. I don't know how many users will ever need this, so if you post a feature request we can see how many users +1 for it.

[rienvanham]

Hi Mario,

I added a feature request. I don't think that many people want to pay an extra amount of money for this feature (off course you can't add this without having extra costs). I'm not talking about OCR-ing, just pulling out the textlayer and index this.

I'm not diappointed if this feature goes to the bin ;-).

Thanks in advance,

Rien.

[lbo]

Everywhere (at least 1.5) uses it's own database

the name is "Everything" by https://www.voidtools.com/

Version 1.5 supports using the Windows Search index instead of (and/or in addition to) it's own index since May 2021, see https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=10007#p36934

[rienvanham]

Yes, stupid me! Indeed Everything (current version 1.5.0.1294a) istead of Everywhere!

Thanks for this correction.