Portfolio Server 8.5

Extensis Portfolio Server has been around for a while now and the 8.5 version of the asset-management solution now includes a workgroup option – Server and Client. Express, NetPublish and SQL Connect modules are also included. Server is effectively a remote catalogue and thumbnail-builder and update-checker. It keeps track of changed files and updates any thumbnails and metadata. The Client builds catalogues and adds the necessary keywords.

Installation is slightly hair-raising. On Windows, the Server application has no front-end at all and gives no indication if it’s running. You have to dig into Windows Manager and open the Services list to start and stop it.

The Server can be set to build a catalogue from a list of assets but this is a fairly slow process. In our test, a folder of 4,500 SLR photos took around four hours.

Once you’re ready to start tagging, you’ll find that keyword handling is clever and powerful. Folder and file names are included as keywords by default, and you can add whatever other keywords you want. You can also search a catalogue by just the keywords, so it’s easy to display only the royalty-free stock in an image collection.

But the Client’s file handling isn’t quite comprehensive. It previews many standard file types including SWFs, video and sound files, and all of the usual image types, and has excellent links to Version Cue in CS3. But our Mac client didn’t preview text files, HTML pages or fonts, and if you’re planning to manage Flash code or web scripts, it will need careful handling. On the plus side, there’s a fairly simple web gallery feature which comes free and includes some appealing templates. And there’s also an Express client which offers a minimal quick preview.

So what’s the verdict? We’re not quite convinced by the top-down server/client approach and aren’t sure it’s the best match to real workflows. A more modern system would automatically spider its way around a workgroup equipped with clients on each machine, collecting files by selected keywords, folder names and attributes, building a workgroup-wide database and optionally collecting the files into a single location for simple archiving. You can build an application that does that, more or less, if you add the SQL Connect, Server and NetPublish options – but this pushes the price to over five figures. The alternative is to spend your time tagging and collecting files by hand – and that seems like the long way around for such an expensive product.