Looking for iView Replacements?

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking to the National Geographic photographers group, The Photo Society. The topic of my talk was the death of iView (aka Expression Media, and Phase One Media Pro). This application has been a real workhorse for photographers, and especially for this group.

Phase One discontinued Media Pro about 18 months ago, but the real moment of truth is the release of Mac OS 10.15. It fully drops support for 32 bit applications so none of the iView/EM/MP versions can run at all under it. One day, you will upgrade your OS, and all the 32 bit apps will be dead. (Windows does not have the same problem right away, but it’s surely coming).

Life Support
If you want to keep Media Pro running, you’ll need to delay OS upgrade as long as possible. This means keeping old hardware running since Apple does not allow you to install an old OS on a new computer.  This is not a huge problem since older computers are inexpensive, plentiful, and powerful enough.  If you need to upgrade your primary machine (and you will, eventually), you’ll need to have another machine to use the software with.

If you expect to make sure you can run the software, you’ll want to make sure you have a bootable clone backup of the OS drive, in the event your computer stops working for some reason.

Migrating iView metadata
Most of the metadata you create in Media Pro is standard IPTC data which is easily readable by many other programs. In order to make that info readable, you typically only need to export the metadata back to the files.  (Select all files, choose Action Menu>Export Annotations>check all options and go.)

If you have Catalog Sets information, you will need to do some work to make it available to other applications. Note that one thing that will NOT come along is the sequencing of the Catalog Sets.

Migration with Bridge
You can convert Catalog Sets to Lightroom-compatible Hierarchical Keywords using Adobe Bridge along with a script. Install the script, and you can transfer the data with a simple menu command,

Here is a link to download the script.

Programs that read the Catalog Sets
Photo Supreme is an application that can read the catalog sets information directly from the files and convert it to Photo Supreme Portfolios. This requires the use of a script supplied directly by Photo Supreme.

Daminion is a Windows only program that looks almost exactly like Media Pro. It can read the Catalog Sets data natively, so no migration is needed.

A Big List
If you’d like to see a huge list of applications, check out list of applications shown at Impulse Adventure.