Action, protest, campaigns, demos and issues magazine features, photos, articles, stories photos of London, New York, Wales, England and photography features music, parties, clubs, events, records, releases drug information, harm reduction, no-nonsense guide punch a celebrity football, features, issues, cardiff city games, useless games and diversions technical info, web authoring, reviews and features site news, updates and urban75 blog urban75 community news and events urban75 bulletin boards join the chatroom search urban75 back to urban75 homepage
London features, photos, history, articles New York features, photos, history, articles Brixton features, photos, history, articles panoramas, 360 degree vistas, London, New York, Wales, England Offline London club night festival reports, photos, features and articles urban75 sitemap and page listing about us, info, FAQs, copyright join our mailing list for updates and news contact urban75
Review of iMatch image management database photo software

BRIEFLY: Comprehensive image management with some unique features

PROS: Powerful, stable, flexible with incredible feature set

CONS: Interface can be confusing and overwhelming at first

PLATFORM: Windows

CONTACT: iMatch

PRICE: $49

SCORE:


URBAN75 5 STAR AWARD! iMatch v3
Get your pictures sorted. Properly.
Review by urban75 for Internet Magazine, Oct 2003


Digital cameras are chuffing top things, and the cheap price of memory cards are encouraging us to click faster than a woodpecker on steroids.

But taking the photos is the easy bit - finding the pesky things later amongst the thousands scattered all over your hard disk can soon become a time-consuming nightmare.

And here's where dedicated image management programs like iMatch come into play.

iMatch photo management software Offering an astonishingly powerful and flexible set of tools, this puppy will keep a rotweiller like grip on the whereabouts of all your images, whether they be on your local hard drive, network or CD Rom/DVD.

Not only can you browse by thumbnail and search by keyword, file name, date or time but iMatch's unique image matching tools let you locate similar images based on colour, texture and shape.

You can even draw a sketch of the image you're looking for, and iMatch will scuttle off and find matching images!

top

Before you can start ferreting through your image collection, you've got to compile a photo database, a job thankfully made a breeze by iMatch's clever wizard.

Simply point it to your photos folder, select your thumbnail preferences (size/image compression), and then sit back while it indexes all your images in double quick time.

Then it's a case of creating your own custom categories and sub categories and using the thumbnail viewer to drag your images into any applicable categories (e.g 'holiday', 'Spain' 'friends', 'beer' etc).

Voila! Your searchable database is ready to go!

top

image editing window, iMatch photo management software As well as its hardcore searching gizmos, iMatch serves up a suite of useful image editing tools including red eye removal, lossless JPEG image, noise removal, levels, gamma adjustments, EXIF, IPTC and RAW data support etc.

They certainly won't put Photoshop out of a job, but they're more than adequate for everyday image tweaking.

iMatch also offers batch renaming and image conversion, contact sheets, scripting support with the ability to automatically add text, borders, watermark images and copyrights to your images.

Naturally, it also comes with a fully customisable Web photo gallery creator.

Not surprisingly, with all these features, iMatch isn't the easiest of programs to get your head around. Despite the comprehensive documentation and flotilla of pop up tips, to get the best out of it you're going to have to do some learning - but it's worth it!

iMatch is not for occasional snappers, but for anyone trying to keep track of a growing collection of images, we can thoroughly recommend program as outstanding value.

FIVE STARS

More info:
» iMatch website


« Back to tech homepage




urban75 - community - action - mag - photos - tech - music - drugs - punch - football - offline club - brixton - london - new york - useless - boards - help/FAQs - © - design - contact - sitemap - search