I have come to a point in my photography where I have amassed a number of images that I can no longer manage effectively using a simple folder hierarchy. I still use Google’s Picasa for my snaps. It is very quick and easy to make minor non-destructive changes to images and has built-in support for emailing and archiving to external media.
My major pain has been RAW workflow which involves a structured, rigorous approach to Digital Asset Management. I have been trying out ACDSee8, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and iView MediaPro3 for a trial period. Each application is great and all offer common functionality in terms of organizing and cataloguing images. iView has the edge though. The interface is not the best in the world but as an application it is very flexible in terms of adding annotations to, and categorising and keywording images. The news that Microsoft have purchased iView lends weight to the argument that this is one of the best DAM applications out there. No doubt a little Microsoft polish to the UI will make it the best.
MediaPro3 has a number of vocabulary fields including country, ISO country codes and IPTC Subject and Scene codes, but the default vocabulary for these codes is empty.
I quite like the idea of having the standard codes available. Thankfully the ISO and IPTC websites supply the information as XML files. I wrote three simple XSL stylesheets to convert the XML codes into a MediaPro3 friendly format. These links are shown below along with the stylesheets. Simply copy the IPTC Subject Code.txt, IPTC Scene.txt, ISO Country Code.txt and Country.txt files to
The directory can be found by opening up the Vocabulary Editor (Ctrl-Alt+,) and clicking the folder icon.