I did a long posting yesterday in dpReview regarding Portfolio. I'll rephrase it a little here, as a sort of post-implementation review.

A “must have” feature of this type of software is the ability to watch a Windows folder - so if you add more files to the folder, the software will show that you need to update the catalogue. Portfolio has this. Also, if you use Windows Explorer to move files into new locations, this feature needs to show the images are missing and prompt you to identify where they are. Portfolio does this well too.

If you need to automate Portfolio, you can even program it from Excel macros or any VB program.

Just to give you a flavour of what it can do, I only bought Portfolio v6 a couple of months ago (recently enough to qualify for a free upgrade to v7). The spark was after doing some writing where I needed to supply words and pictures. To reflect the book structure, I divided the work into 6 folders, each of which had subfolders (total 80), and each of which contained Word, Photoshop and TIF files. One of the big pains was checking whether I'd already used the same picture - it took ages to search through the folder structure. Portfolio sorted this out in minutes and even parsed the folder names into searchable keywords. I only bought it after finishing the bulk of the work and was left wishing I'd invested in it two or three months earlier. (“invested” in the sense of “bought the software”!).

When I was evaluating the products, the key requirements were:

1. handling raw images, in my case Nikon
2. dealing with missing/moved files
3. setting up my own categories
4. coping well with large numbers of files (eg 1000) in the same folder, which seemed to freeze Photoshop CS's file browser.
5. file import/export - so I could get stuff out if I moved to another product

Portfolio did all of these well, and I've currently around 6500 images in my main catalogue. Performance is good, v7 is distinctly faster than v6. It's very drag and drop in style and, to this PC user, feels like a nicely-designed Mac program. One feature I've discovered ,and especially like, is that you can add “placeholders”, records for images that are not yet created. Before you scratch your head, I used this feature by importing my MS Access listing of contact sheets from my darkroom days and am now going through matching the placeholders to scans. So they act as a checklist. Once a contact sheet is scanned, Portfolio's big thumbail option (you can toggle) means I can almost see the images on each sheet, certainly for medium format negs.

Obviously the thumbnails are stored in the database, but another nice feature is that you can also store full size previews. I use this option because 99% of my stuff is raw - storing these full size previews slows the initial importing and uses disk space (I've lots) but has the big advantage that when I double click a thumbnail, Portfolio is faster because it doesn't need to access the original file.

http://www.portfoliofaq.com is an independently-maintained site and is full of hints and tips by an experienced user/consultant. It gave me a really fast start.

Anyway, I could go on and on, and already have. But hopefully you can sense my enthusiasm for the product and real world examples to which you can relate. It's more expensive than the rest, but I feel it's better.