Rank and File and IVMP3

[AlanDunne]

Peter,

one of the "raison d'etre" for R&F was to allow Bridge to play nicely with catelogue or other DAM tools. With IVMP3 now supporting Bridge XMP ratings, do you see a dimished role for R&F? I guess I can answer my own question somewhat as follows:

- Unlike ratings, IVMP3 and Bridge labels are not transportable, so R&F still allows this.
- To keep your Bridge rating truely transportable to any DAM that supports keywords (but not all XMP), you would still need R&F.

I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Regarding Bridge and IVMP interactions (arguably any catelogue tool, not just IVMP) there is one feature I would like to see. I am not sure if this would be a feature in the catelogue tool, or if this would be something scriptable, but here goes ...

I would like to be able to do a search in IVMP based on whatever criteria. The search features in Bridge are limited, as is pointed out in "The DAM Book". Once I have the search results, I would like to be able to "open" those results in Bridge. Two examples of where I would use this:

1) I may have a bunch of DNG files scattered all of the place on my storage media. Through a keyword search I have found specific files in assorted folders, that I want to open in ACR to re-process for B&W. In this case Bridge is my preferred choice as the front door to ACR.

2) As above, I have done a keyword search and located files spread all over the place, physcially. I want to run my Photoshop batch actions that I have for preparing files for printing. Bridge is a convenient launching point for the Photoshop batch job.

I still see Bridge as the next step after the search, Perhaps I am wrong, and the scripting that needs to be done is to have IVMP be the front door to photoshop.

Your thoughts on this would be most welcome. In the past week I have started to learn Javascript, however, I think it will be many months before I am sufficiently fluent to do anything constructive. My last programming was done around 20 years ago, and I was primarily doing Fortran, Pascal, and 8085 assembly language, so there is considerable rust to be brushed off.

Cheers ... Alan

[peterkrogh]

one of the "raison d'etre" for R&F was to allow Bridge to play nicely with catelogue or other DAM tools. With IVMP3 now supporting Bridge XMP ratings, do you see a dimished role for R&F? I guess I can answer my own question somewhat as follows:

- Unlike ratings, IVMP3 and Bridge labels are not transportable, so R&F still allows this.
- To keep your Bridge rating truely transportable to any DAM that supports keywords (but not all XMP), you would still need R&F.

You are correct about that. IVMP now sees the Bridge Ratings, but does not se the Labels.  R&F changes these to Keywords, so that is a help.

And you are also correct that if you want to use Spotlight - or some other IPTC-aware application to see ratings, then R&F will make that possible.

There's another couple of reasons that R&F is still an important part of my workflow.  By keeping  a separate record of Ratings values, you are much less likely to lose this valuable work due to keyboard error.  It's not hard to select all images, and accidentally hit the 0 key, erasing all those ratings.

R&F is also writing the Filename to the Preserved Filename field, and I think this will be a valuable action over the life of the archive, as it will enable an easy lookup of the image even if the name gets changed.

I would like to be able to do a search in IVMP based on whatever criteria. The search features in Bridge are limited, as is pointed out in "The DAM Book". Once I have the search results, I would like to be able to "open" those results in Bridge. Two examples of where I would use this:

1) I may have a bunch of DNG files scattered all of the place on my storage media. Through a keyword search I have found specific files in assorted folders, that I want to open in ACR to re-process for B&W. In this case Bridge is my preferred choice as the front door to ACR.

2) As above, I have done a keyword search and located files spread all over the place, physcially. I want to run my Photoshop batch actions that I have for preparing files for printing. Bridge is a convenient launching point for the Photoshop batch job.

Alan,
Check out Page 208.  You can do this.  Select multiple images in iView, and use the command "Open with Photoshop CS2" and see what happens.

As to your issue 2, Why can't you have iView do the conversion and batching?  The one thing I can't get it to do is to run scripts (like the CaptionMaker).  But it will do batch conversions.
Peter

[AlanDunne]

Peter,

good point regarding the "preserve filename"  feature in Rank and File. Perhaps an even better point about keyboard error recovery. I know that I have accidentally erased my labels and ratings a few times in Bridge after I did a select all. Grrrrrrr ... there is no undo function for this.

I have confirmed your response about opening raw files from IVMP addresses my first issue. Thanks for the tip.

When I do my batch job for print (usually on TIFF masters), I have PS actions that apply different sharpening parameters for different output resolution and media (glossy, matte, etc). I am new to IVMP, but as far as I can tell I cannot drive actions from IVMP. I still want to do my find operation in IVMP, then follow up with a batch action. I suppose if I open with CS2, I could open all the files and apply the actions from there. If there are a lot of files and if they are a larger size, I am guessing that it would be slow. That is why I saw Bridge as a useful intermediary. I will have to do some experiments to see if my theory is correct. If it is not, then I would have no issue with this approach.

Cheers ... Al

[peterkrogh]

Al,
I'll see if we can get Shayne Bowman over here to explain using a PS droplet to do this.  I should know, but am a bit overwhelmed at the moment.  I think this can be done.
Peter

[ShayneBowman]

It really rather simple. Basically you save your Photoshop Action as a droplet. Assign the droplet as a Helper Application. Select your media items and Open With the droplet (in Helper App menu). This will launch Photoshop and process all files according to the droplet.

From page 118 of the 3.0.1 Manual
"Droplets created by Photoshop or Image-Ready can be integrated into your workflow by assigning them as Helper Applications (see figure). A Rotate 90-degree clockwise Photoshop droplet or Make JPEG (quality 60) ImageReady compression droplet will save you quite a bit of time when used as a MediaPro Helper. Any AppleScript applet, scriplet or droplet that has been saved as an executable can be defined in MediaPro as a Helper."

[peterkrogh]

Thanks, Shayne.

[AlanDunne]

Shayne,

this solution works almost perfectly. I say almost perfecty because there is one strange thing. I save my action as a droplet and give it the same name as the action. In IVMP. I use the menu for creating helper apps and select the droplet name to add it to the list. The droplet gets the correct icon (i.e the down arrow thingy) in the helper apps list, but gets renamed to "Adobe Photoshop CS2". All my droplet helper apps get this name so it is difficult so figure out which one I am selecting. I have searched the IVMP manual but have not seen anything that tell me how to stop this from happening.

After several years of reading Photoshop books, I finally found a purpose for droplets. I could never figure out why they were needed.

Cheers ... Alan