4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very powerful in some respects, very weak in others, 5 Jan 2007
This review is from: Portfolio 8.0 Mac/Win (CD-ROM)
I tried this at version 4 and quickly gave up because it was just such and annoying application. I've returned to it now with version 8, because I need something that can handle, preview and sort 12Gb of images in a single folder with sub-folders, without choking. Although it's improved since v4, it's still far from perfect. Extensis need to take note of the ease-of-use and intuitive interface of other applications (such as Google's excellent and free Picasa) if it's to make Portfolio pleasant to work with day-in and day-out for large image volumes.
Portfolio is incredibly powerful at sorting files, but also annoying and counter-intuitive at far too many points. Some examples:
Delete a folder from your index and off the disk. That's easy enough, but then Portfolio will force-start a re-indexing of the entire database. That's not much fun when you've got 12gb of images and the re-indexing takes an hour. It re-indexes _even_ when you've told it you want to re-index only when you specifically tell it to.
Having opened a single image, closing it again should take one click. But Portfolio insists you use two clicks, every single time! That is very very annoying. Especially when you're dealing with 40,000 images.
Want to view a single image full-screen, with no clutter? You can only do that in a primitive slideshow along with other images.
Weigh your purchase carefully; even for its intended audience of high-end commercial image libraries, there are probably now better applications out there. The usability doesn't scale down nicely for the average semi-pro photographer, and there are now many viable alteratives at that level too.
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