All That You Survey If you're losing track of all the multimedia information on your hard drive, there's an easy solution: Organize it with catalog software.
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If you've a business to promote, you probably have a darkvault on your hard drive bulging with pictures, sounds, animation,slides and video clips for use in your marketing materials, reportsand Web pages. But when your digital vault becomes so crowded anddisorganized that you dread looking for the file you need, it'stime to get a professional multimedia cataloger like Portfolio. Andif you've given up on slow, crash-happy, freebie catalogersthat lack sophisticated options, you'll find Portfolio wellworth the price ($200, street).
With Portfolio, you simply click Catalog/Add Items and choosethe files or the file formats you want to add to a particular"portfolio." The program then pops smaller images onto apage you can scroll all at once; you can view a larger image with adouble click. You can also look at just the images in ThumbnailView; at an index of names with the thumbnail you select in ListView; or a single record with image, keyword and description inRecord View. The Customize button lets you decide what additionalfile information (such as height, width, and color mode) you'dlike to display with each type of view. When it's time tocreate output using multimedia graphics, sound, video, animationand so on, scripting options in AppleScript or Visual Basic helpyou publish to the Internet or other venues. You can even tap intoother companies' digital image banks by clicking hot linksright from Portfolio.
Rebecca Frances Rohan has been a computer and Internetjournalist since 1988. She is the author of Building Better WebPages (AP Professional).
