[williegorilla]

Our architectural office has been using Camedia Master for managing photos for years.We use both PCs and Macs, and there are about 20 of us. Lately the 2.5 version became rather unstable, sometimes disappearing off the screen without warning. We installed the newer 4.0 version, which is more stable, and faster, but now we face another problem. In the 2.5 version, batch photo renaming or naming is possible. In the 4.0 version, only one photo at a time can be renamed (even though "Help" says batch renaming can still be done). This is a major problem for our office, which handles hundreds of photos at a time. Batch renaming of photos is essential to us, and Camedia Master V. 4.0 no longer does the job, forcing us first,to do the renaming in V. 2.5, then switching over to V. 4.0. This is obviously very cumbersome. Any solution, other than popping for a more powerful program, such as FotoStation, which retails at $539 per license? Camedia offers an upgrade for $19.95. Would that solve the problem? Any comments, anyone?

[linskyjack]

It shocks me that an office of 20 computers would use a shoddy piece of software like Camedia Master to handle batch renaming (or for that case anything). There are so many superior products on the market---like Irfan etc that do the job so much better.

[slipe]

My daughter is a draftsman in an architectural office of about the same size and I’m always amazed at their software and hardware limitations. I guess it is the competitive nature of the business that they don’t even keep up to date with AutoCad. They have never used anything as poor as Camedia Master for organizing, but there are probably other things that evolved the same way. Once everyone learns to use something and it is working it is hard to change.

I have no idea whether the Pro version will unlock your bulk processing, but I know of a place that will give you a free trial. Drop me a private message and I’ll get it to you.

I have tried just about every organizing program on the market and always come back to Irfanview. You can make the thumbnails large enough to make decisions with them and the navigator lets you make and name files within the Windows system rather than anything proprietary while referring to the large thumbnails. You can hold the Ctrl key while you select thumbnails and move, copy, cut, rename, resize etc in bulk very easily. The latest version lets you read sub-folders, which is handy for organizing and renaming.

[williegorilla]

A major problem with finding a suitable photo management (our firm uses Camedia but is not happy with it) is that our firm uses both Macs and PCs. The popular Irfan is a PC-only program from what I gather. There don't seem to be a lot of programs that support both Macs and PCs. FotoStation does, but it is expensive and not all that user friendly from what I can tell after having tested a trial version. It is, however, the best I have seen so far that is available both to Macs and PCs. iView (it has both PC and Mac versions) is cheaper than FotoStation but it does not store the media files; you have drag your photos into a "catalog" of images, not files, and keep separate files--too cumbersome. One advantage of Camedia is that it is PC/Mac. Know of any other good programs that are PC/Mac useable?