Fotostation 6 works with XMP

As this is my first contribution to this - excellent! - forum please allow me to introduce myself briefly: I work as a photographer and we are running a small business with most of the time 3 people working on projects. We are running - when they function, that is - 4 PC's and my Macbook over a small office network. The main PC has several harddisks connected to it and serves as the spine of our office.

This far we have always worked with FotoStation software, as this is also used by two of the stock agencies that I work with. Working with FotoStation has become more awkward since I use digital capture. It works directly with large collections of images and is great for (batch) captioning and IPTC in general. I can not get used to using iView for that. I am a strong advocate of Lightroom but LR has made me realise that FotoStation 5 has major flaws when working with Raw files:

- it is fully IPTC but not XMP aware.
- any changes in the image are not reflected in the thumbnails
- I can't preview colour accurate NEF images, nor e-mail JPG's from NEF to clients without the JPG's having odd colours

I have been waiting for FotoStation to come up with up-to-date software, that supports XMP, the 5-star rating used in Adobe software and other features.

Recently FotoStation 6 hit the market and I am currently reviewing the trail version. It's not bad at all, but it has very little improvements over version 5 and has not embraced features that I started to like in Lightroom, such as the 5-star rating.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to move on now:

- Bite the bullet and learn whole new software such as iView (cheaper than FotoStation: cool!)
- Work around the shortcomings and continue with FotoStation 6
- Other options that I am not aware of?

Best regards,

Lars Soerink