Last year PhaseOne finally acquired – “liberated” may be a better word -  Expression Media from Microsoft and gave it back its old name, MediaPro. I say “finally” because they had tried to add the original iView MediaPro cataloguing program to their CaptureOne raw conversion products back in 2006, and also because in those five years the post processing and cataloguing landscape has been transformed with the introduction of two major programs that combine those once-separate activities. To give an idea of how completely things have changed, I remember announcing Microsoft’s takeover to a trade show at Manchester United’s stadium, and since 2006 oil money has transformed City from a long-running joke into a pumped-up monster which might no longer need to call in Channel 4′s Time Team archaeologists to find any trophies (oh for the Arab spring to sweep away Abu Dhabi’s feudal rulers – that would be so City). Of course, some things stay the same and after Sunday’s demolition of Abramovitch’s expensive toy, United are on the verge of the 19th league title and another European Cup. But the change in how photographers now manage and process their pictures is “massive”, and first Apple’s Mac-limited Aperture and then the continuing and apparently-irresistible rise of Adobe’s Lightroom make me wonder if there’s any space left for the old favourite. Still, the €50 upgrade from Expression Media may not be an Hernandez-style bargain but is about the right price. At €160 new, MediaPro looks overpriced – more like an Edin Dzeko?

A lot of the work appears cosmetic – a modern, gloomy-grey interface – and almost all the familiar features remain untouched. But

• I spotted that the Virtual Earth geotagging feature has been dropped, very quietly, and while I imagine it was Microsoft’s code it’s still a shame to lose one of the few positive things that Redmond did with the program (apart from eventually selling it on). Instead of geotagging within the app, you now have a menu command Window > View Location on Map which displays the first selected image in a Google Maps browser window (it’s little better than a script I think I once wrote!).
• One very welcome improvement is the lifting of the 128,000 file and 2Gb catalogue size limits. This was probably top of my list – back in 2006 when I met with Microsoft.
• When you “sync” or save metadata back to the pictures, you can now write  it to sidecar files. Creating sidecars was one of many features that the iView guys had begun and making them work effectively should have been low hanging fruit for Microsoft. Removing the odd limitation to output sidecars to one folder at a time means it’s easier to exchange metadata with C1 and other programs that rely on sidecars (it was always possible with DNGs, of course!). Sadly though, you still have to invoke the sync operation manually, and it still overwrites any Adobe Camera Raw metadata.
• A second change isn’t mentioned, and I may be wrong in imagining it, but importing speed seems to be enormously improved. Almost instantly I could scroll through thousands of freshly-imported raw files – when you’re used to Lightroom, it’s quite remarkable.

If you’re unfamiliar with the program, take a look at series of tutorials by Peter Krogh who has also written some thoughts here. I’ll add other links as/if they appear, but already there’s Why Separate is Better Than Integrated, a curious defence from Capture Integration of the decision to keep P1 and MediaPro as separate programs (maybe they should call themselves Capture Separately?). Take the alleged problem attributed to Lightroom’s integration where:

“the photographer is tethered to a laptop for instant review of the images by an on-site Art Director. During the shoot cataloging features are completely useless”

Unfortunately this is not fundamentally a result of these two functions being incompatible in a single program but simply of it being Adobe’s first attempt at tethering, and not getting every detail right. Lightroom certainly could, probably should, have an option to switch tethering so it’s limited to the second screen, leaving the main screen to be used as normal. Another example of how it’s merely a design/implementation detail is how there isn’t yet the ability to add an overlay during tethering – a lot of tethered work requires shooting to a magazine cover or other layout (vote here). One could also see it as a result of Adobe’s failure to respond to small studios’ needs for Lightroom to have multi-user capability. So again, nothing to do with separate or integrated!

“take for instance the needs of a Wedding Photographer who is creating/updating his collection of his best marketing materials. In this case the ability to deeply refine/adjust the image is moot.”

Again, unfortunately not! Look at one very common way Aperture fans explain their preferences over Lightroom – they can be doing any task, such as creating a portfolio, and quickly make adjustments without needing to go into another of those nasty un-Maclike modules. Or think how often people demand Adobe merge the Library and Develop workspaces. The trouble is, a lot of photographers do have 5 second attention spans and no matter how much Lightroom’s modular design steers them in the direction of working methodically and efficiently, they don’t want to complete one task before moving onto another. “Creatives” do jump about.

I doubt we’ll ever get close to 2006/2007′s promise of “one ring to rule them all” where the whole photographic workflow would take place in one environment, but separating managing and post processing is like pulling apart the two supporting pillars of a modern, efficient workflow. If you do use CaptureOne, it makes sense.

As a final point, Aperture seems stuck in its niche and no longer the “Photoshop killer” that so spurred Adobe on, Lightroom increasingly appears to be growing organically and without the need for continuing major investment, and at the same time the excitement seems elsewhere – Adobe can’t take the risk of not putting enormous energy into creating solutions that either run on, or create content for iPads (other tablets exist). Now, more than any point in the past 5 years, I’d love there to be real competition to Lightroom.

PhaseOne’s site now has an excellent series of movies by Peter Krogh showing how to use Expression Media with CaptureOne.

I must admit that since taking up the free CaptureOne offer, I’ve not done much more than install the program on my main computers. Over the years, while respecting it as one of the very best raw converters, I’ve never used it much and am pretty unfamiliar with its workflow, so I was mostly interested in seeing the CaptureOne related material.

But I was also keen to see what Phase had added to  CaptureOne  in the 5.1 update released shortly after the Expression Media acquisition. So I particularly liked “Sending Images from Expression Media 2 to Capture One” and “Sending Images from Capture One to Expression Media”.

It’s bound to be a while before we see any real fruits from the change of ownership – and let’s hope one juicy morsel is a change of name back to iView or at least choose something that’s less of 5 syllable mouthful than Expression Media. Yet 5.1′s little tweaks are promising and give some idea of what to expect. CaptureOne now reads Expression Media’s catalog sets and mirrors them as its own “session albums”, and other metadata is also passed back and forth. At certain points you do have to tell it to make this information transfer via menu commands, so that needs to get slicker before the integration could be called “seamless” (for what that often misused word is worth). But am I just too jaded, too cheesed off that Microsoft proved the Mac-lovers right when they whined about iView being swallowed by Redmond, or should I be more convinced that a two legged suite can prove a better way to manage and adjust your pictures than a Lightroom-style program that addresses both sides of the pixel mountain?

The BJP interviews Henrik O. Håkonsson, president and CEO of Phase One, on the iView / Expression Media acquisition:

“We’ve used the Expression Media software for many years, both when it was not owned and owned by Microsoft,” he says. “We could see that Microsoft was not so eager to expand in this particular field. We felt that if we took over, we could improve Expression Media and make it a super efficient tool.”

However, Håkonsson tells BJP, Phase One has to be careful of what happens to Expression Media. “There are two groups of customers for this software. You have the customers who want to pick and choose. They might be using Capture One along side a management platform developed by another company. They want to choose what they like. The other group of customer want one workflow software. They want to be able to do both editing and management tasks in the same software, both for stills and videos.” And, Håkonsson says, Phase One has to cater to both groups.

From those words and what I’ve read elsewhere, it sounds like they’re not thinking of combining the two programs, Lightroom-style, but of a Clegg-Cameron style integration and communication between two independent programs. But 3 or is it 4 years into the era of combined DAM and raw adjustment workflow, is a less ambitious but more practical route really the right way forward?

Is it 4 years ago that I was doing an iView presentation to photographers at Old Trafford, finally getting my chance to perform at United’s “theatre of dreams”. My talk ended at 5pm, the same time as the embargo was lifted on the news that Microsoft had just bought the product, so I was able to finish the presentation with a last minute showstopper (even if Beardsworth seems as unlikely as Michael Owen to be listed with Scholes, Rooney….) Sadly, though iView/Expression Media made a couple of appearances, soon this promising young player seemed forgotten in the reserves. More like the theatre of base comedy.

Around the same time, two or three years back, PhaseOne and Microsoft seemed quite close for a while. There was a technology partnership, whatever that term may mean, I heard rumours of Microsoft investing in PhaseOne, and you could certainly see some logic to the relationship. Microsoft had rebranded iView as Expression Media, so gobbling up PhaseOne and combining the two would have given Redmond a route to a product in the Lightroom-Aperture space. But that development never happened, I heard the iView developers who had relocated to the US moved on, and Microsoft didn’t seem to know what to do with Expression Media. For the last year or so, it seemed like a dead duck, neither walking nor quacking.

Then a couple of days ago, someone dropped a hint that there might be some news, which turns out to be that PhaseOne had swooped. As with Microsoft, there’s now a chance that if Phase One devote the resources to develop the product, they now have the opportunity to build a workflow application themselves, and it would begin with the advantage of being able to catalogue whatever type of file the photographer chooses. As with Microsoft’s ownership, only time will tell if it’s good news for iView. At least it’s now free to be loved again.

It was no secret that it was on the way, but my friend Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book has now been listed on Amazon US and Amazon UK. The original book was immediately unusual in its cover not being emblazoned with “Photoshop CS2″ or focussing on the image processing side of the pixel mountain. Peter rightly saw that the management and safeguarding of digital photos was digital photography’s dangerously-neglected aspect, and this understanding of the real needs meant the book’s shelf life extended across software release cycles and remained applicable after entirely new programs were introduced. But even long-lasting underlying principles eventually need dusting off, and this new version of the book is a complete rewrite. Thanks Peter for asking me to tech edit a couple of chapters – I look forward to my signed copy!

And now for some of my own reflections… (or alternatively). When you look back at the the original book, it offered a solution containing four main strands – Bridge, iView, Photoshop, and DNG tying it all together and letting you see the adjusted raw data in any other program. I had already adopted the same sort of workflow before the original book came out, and my first contact with Peter was when he noticed something I’d posted about DNG in a forum. In fact, around the time he must have begun his book for O’Reilly, my UK publishers had turned down my similar book proposal as they thought their US partners – O’Reilly – simply wouldn’t be interested in the topic….

So I was already very much in agreement with his approach then, and it’s interesting to consider how things have changed over 4-5 years. For the better? Well, I’m not so sure. In Lightroom and Aperture we do have a pair of new and significant cataloguing programs which combine processing with DAM, but extensible XMP’s promise of portable metadata remains unfulfilled by them (Aperture can’t even read sidecar files) and the idea of a DAM program limited to camera-originated file types is now challenged – if it was ever valid – by our having three DSLRs that can output video too.

Have things changed for the worse then? No, not that either – the old four-legged solution still works fine, Bridge CS4 is a big leap forward (for example), Adobe have maintained parity and let you do the same adjustments either in Lightroom or the Camera Raw dialog (perhaps surprisingly when they could have introduced more product differentiation here), while iView’s still there in its Microsoft Expression Media guise and still shows your DNGs’ adjusted appearance. Bigger raw files keep piling up, Nikon and Canon still fail to offer DNG as an option, still offer in-camera settings that only make sense if you use their own raw converters and which you never have time to set when you’re busy snapping, and otherwise-excellent programs like Capture One still insist on new file formats (at least for now only their medium format back customers are being offered this delightful suppository).

But we will continue to cope – all this still hasn’t overwhelmed the fingers in the dyke of yet-bigger hard drives, multi processor cores, and all that the extra RAM – and we’re still successfully finding yet more comforting ways to slow computers down to our thinking speed. Maybe “different” is all we can ever expect, and success in DAM is still being there, still holding back the flood (the version on Fripp’s Exposure LP is even better).

These days, though you often wonder if fully-released versions differ from that condition, everyone’s doing prolonged public betas of imaging software. Microsoft have joined in too, releasing Expression Media 2 (formerly iView) as a beta for Windows and Mac.

Nearly two years since the acquisition, Microsoft haven’t ruined the program, but there’s surprisingly little progress or persuasive reasons to switch from iView. There is some good stuff, like effectively-eliminating the Windows program’s dependence on Apple QuickTime, but the few new features are mostly half-done.

For example, the hierarchical keywords feature lets you assign pictures to a leaf node in the new Keywords Finder, and the image automatically gets all its parents keywords. Great. But the opposite should happen when I delete images from that node ? the ?real? keywords should be deleted too.

Or take the new Virtual Earth window which displays where you took GPS-tagged pictures. On Windows dragging untagged images to the VE window will add GPS coordinates to the catalogue. Sounds handy. But you must first centre the map at exactly the right location and then drop those images in a rectangular area at the top of the window. Why can’t you drop them on directly on the map? And on the Mac, drag and drop to the VE window doesn’t work at all. So good idea has been so insufficiently developed that it’s not all that useful.

Working my way through the other new features, I’m also pretty underwhelmed by “Support of new file formats”. Firstly, EM2 will no longer import DNG files on Windows XP, most likely because I have not installed a Codec. OK, I’m the sort of bloke who might know that’s the case, but at the very least EM2 should tell me what?s up, and point me to where I get the solution. If someone has failed to provide the Codec, the web page should say who has agreed to do so, and by when. Or Microsoft should simply do what Apple and a one man band have done and write their own. Really, the user shouldn?t even have to think about this.

Secondly, “Support of new file formats” includes the new MS Office 2007 formats. OK, we all know “support” is a malleable term, but “support” really has to go beyond importing and showing file icons, which you could already do in iView using the custom.txt file. It should mean displaying document previews, which you still can’t do. I also expect that when I enter keywords in Word or Excel (in Document Properties), I should also see them in EM2. After all I can see the caption, author, title and other properties. Why have keywords been forgotten? It can’t be rocket science – I can do it in VBS via Microsoft’s own dsofile.dll. I also expect to Sync from EM2 back into Office documents. Again, no can do.

If you read this blog, you’ll know I’m no Microsoft basher – quite the opposite. But my feeling for this EM2 beta is rather like my reaction to Aperture 1.7, sorry 2 – it seems harmless.

As a frequent contributor to web forums on “digital asset management” software (cataloguing programs like Portfolio, iView and iMatch), you soon distinguish fellow travellers who’ve also thought a bit more deeply about the issues. One of those is Peter Krogh who dropped me a nice email yesterday.

Peter’s a Maryland-based advertising photographer and O’Reilly is just about to publish his The DAM Book: The Digital Asset Management for Photographers:

brings clarity to the often overwhelming task of managing digital photographs, with a solid plan and practical advice for fellow photographers on how to file, find, protect and re-use photographs.

Following a thorough overview of the DAM system and de-mystifications of metadata and digital archiving, Krogh focuses on best practices for digital photographers using Adobe Photoshop CS2. He explains how to use Adobe Bridge along with Camera Raw, the DNG file format and DAM software. He shows you how to cut down your image processing time, while simultaneously preparing images for a long-term archive.

18 months ago I suggested such a book to my publishers. Maybe I should have been more persuasive….
Q: How many writers does it take to change a bookstore’s lightbulb?
A: One to change it, but a line at the cash register saying “I should have done that”.