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- Provides: DAM (Data Management) for organizing and viewing all of your media
- Format: DVD
- Developer: Microsoft
- Minimum Requirements: 500MHz PowerPC G4 or Intel processor, Mac os X v10.4.9, 512MB RAM, 1.5GB hard disk space, DVD drive, 1024x768 display, Internet access (for Entourage and certain features)
- Processor Compatibility: Universal
- Retail Price (as part of Office 2008): Student version: $149.95, Office version: $399.95, w/ Expression Media: $499.95. (Please note download discounts and upgrade prices at Microsoft's website.)
- Availability: Out now
Expression, known as iView before Microsoft purchased the company, has been part of Microsoft for about a year, and is now one part of a whole new line from Microsoft—mostly only for the PC. Expression Media is cross platform, and, if you purchase Office Media Edition, is part of Office 2008. Expression Media is a DAM, or Digital Access Management program. That is, if you have two hundred or two hundred thousand images, you can use Expression Media to help organize, find, and manage your images. It can be used by the professional photographer or the amateur. If you do not have Photoshop or a similar image editing program, you can do rudimentary adjustments and alterations with Expression. Similarly, you can create contact sheets and web galleries. As you shall read, Expression has some great strengths and some surprising weaknesses.
[Note: This is one part of a six part review. We recommend you read the Office 2008 Overview before reading this or any other review as it describes a number of features and dynamics that cover all of the Office programs.]
There are few differences in what you see between Expression 2, Expression 1, and the previous iView 3 beyond the branding that Microsoft has done. There are, in fact, a number of changes, but those are mostly "under the hood." Some of the things way back in iView 3 that were very annoying are still there. By the way, if you purchased Office 2008-Media Edition, you get the update to Expression 2 for free—it's available now for free downloading. If you already have the Media Edition, once Expression is installed, you can use the new version with no interruption and with the same files you created for Expression 1 (and earlier versions of iView).
iView itself was developed about 10 years ago as a free Mac media browser. Over the years, the program split into a Pro version and a "Lite" version, where the Pro version competed with Extensis Portfolio for features and matched in price. The lite version was significantly less expensive and was mostly used as a mechanism to view media files. Before the sale to Microsoft, iView version 3 was released (around June '05) with some strange decisions for a few of its features. More on that later. One good thing to see is that iView used to come with a free Media Player so that you could send people "slide shows" of your image. This can still be done, but you must download your media players from Microsoft. Those can be downloaded here.
One more side point before I begin the formal review, please note that the graphic for the icon is radically different than any of the other Office programs. Actually, there is a whole different graphic theme for the Expression line from Microsoft, seen at Microsoft's Expression line of products. If you are curious where the strange icon for Expression came from, it's what happens when you zoom into an image so much that you lose perspective as to what you are looking at. However, when you open the installer for Expression, you can see from where the original icon fragment was pulled.
While all of Office's programs install with the Office installation, Expression comes from a separate disk and also has its own serial number. After installing Expression, you will not be asked to enter the code automatically, leaving you the false expectation that you do not need to enter it. However, after 30 days, you will be asked to enter a code unless you had previously gone to the Help menu and selected "Enter Code."
Probably Expression's biggest value is that you can take all of your images and dump them into the program, and, in a very reasonable amount of time, you will have thumbnails generated for them all, letting you review and view your images. As a test, I took a folder I have with 11,778 files, and in less than an hour I had a functioning catalog of them all with complete thumbnails for every one. Well, mostly, but I'll get back to that in a moment. For the record, this folder contains 59.2 GB of files, and the saved Expression file (containing all of the thumbnails) is 126.3 MB. The big advantage here is that if all of my images were on an external drive and I removed it from my system, I could still view all of my images, or at least the thumbnails thereof, and determine which images I needed to access. This means you can do this for any removable media.
As you enter the images, or at any later time, you can enter keywords to help you find your images. One of the big problems with organizing your images by folder is what do you call the folders? For example, let's say you took a vacation and on that vacation you visited your Aunt Zelda. If you place your image into a folder called Vacation, how do you find images of your Aunt? If you placed your images into a folder called New Jersey and that was placed inside a folder called Vacations, how do you find your Aunt? If your Aunt was holding your dog, do you place that image in a folder called Aunt Zelda or Fido? Or New Jersey?
With keywords, you simply click on the Aunt Zelda link to see only images of Aunt Zelda, Fido's link to see only images of Fido, and New Jersey to see images of New Jersey. And if Fido is being held by Aunt Zelda and she is in New Jersey, that same image will come up regardless which of the keywords is selected. What you can't do is call up all images of Aunt Zelda, except those that also have Fido. Regardless of the lack of Boolean logic, the neat thing is that finding one or one hundred images via keywords takes a fragment of a moment. The speed of this is beyond amazing.
Working with the general controls of Expression is mostly straightforward once you learn Expression's tool icons. Fortunately there are tooltips to get you started. From the row of tools below, one can select which program to open any given image, show the image in the Finder, delete the image, e-mail the image, annotate the images, etc.
A bit to the left of the tools shown above are the controls to the info region of the left side of Expression's window. If an image is selected and you click on the Info tab, all of the discernible information about that image can be displayed.
The Organization tab is for organizing your images. If you want to find any of the categories below, simply click on the "dot" region on the right. Below, I've located every one of the 523 photoshop images. Unfortunately, what you can't do is find all of the photoshop images that have 3 stars. In other words, Boolean operations are not possible.
To view images and media in Expression, there are three options: List, Thumbnail, and Media. The list view is very straightforward, and is shown below.
If you click on the Thumbnail tab, you will see the self-contained thumbnail of the image (more on that in a moment).
Now, if you either click on the Media tab (with a specific image selected) or double-click an image, you will be transferred to the Media tab and can view a larger view of the image as seen below.
The one issue that can catch you with the Media view is that you may or may not be shown the full image. I found that the view was typically zoomed in. If you press Command-0 (zero), you will be zoomed out to see the full image display in the region available in the Media window.
As stated earlier, Expression is for viewing media (as opposed to just images), and an impressive range of media can be displayed: QT and QTVR, to Photoshop files, JPEGs GIFs, PDFs, Flash (flv), Illustrator, EPS, sound files, and so on. It can read Adobe's DNG files and many RAW files, but not all. For example, I had some NIF images from my old Nikon 5700 that it couldn't read, but it could read from a friend's D200 and D300. The movie, flash, and sound files can play in the Media view.
What Expression could neither read, nor even see was .hdr images (radiance files for HDR images). They did not even show up as a generic icon; they didn't exist, as far as Expression was concerned. In addition, if you've corrected RAW images in Adobe Camera RAW, the sidecar files show up as generic page icons and are ignored as far as any kind of image correction. [Note: In Adobe's Bridge, if you move RAW images around from folder to folder within Bridge, the sidecar files are automatically moved as well. If you move these images from folder to folder in the Finder or Expression Media, the sidecar files are not automatically transferred.] If you've converted your RAW images into DNG images, the sidecar files are not an issue, but neither the RAW images nor the DNG images will display any corrections and/or alterations you made in Adobe Camera Raw within Expression.
In addition, if you have either Photoshop or TIF images with a variety of correction layers, how those images show up in Expression may be anyone's guess. Consider the following thumbnails. On the left is the original JPEG, and on the right is a Photoshop file with a layer mask. The curious thing is that the yellow is not an accurate representation of what the layer mask looked like, and I have no idea why it was interpreted as yellow. Either way, it is a mask. Were I not to have had the original JPEG next to this image, I would never have had an idea what the image was.
Besides this image, most of the other Photoshop and TIF images that had multiple layers displayed just fine, with the exception that any alterations and corrections made with those layers did not display in the image. In addition, if an image does not have a composite (JPEG) image, the thumbnail and image show up as the following.
So, exactly what does Expression Media show of an image? Most images, including RAW images, have a built-in JPEG thumbnail. When you are making corrections in PS, you do have the option of having that default JPEG update as you make changes, but that's not always essential or desired. What those JPEGs do provide is extremely fast loading of thumbnail images. What they do not provide (besides corrected views) is accurate color representation of an image. So, if you are a professional photographer and it is very very important to see accurate colors of an image prior to (say) printing or displaying images to a client, be careful with Expression Media.
If you do not use or have access to Photoshop, you can do rudimentary image corrections with Expression Media, as it does come with its own correction/enhancement tools. These tools can do a reasonable job of fixing photos, but if good correction is important to you, I'd strongly recommend that you consider either Photoshop Elements or Photoshop.
One of the legacies from iView that should never have seen the light of day was the Preferences dynamics. Observe the view below. This is one of those little things that is just plane wrong. If you select "General," and then want to work with "Media Rendering...," you need to reselect Expression Media 2 menu, reselect Preferences, and then select what you want. This is so different from the great preferences of Office 2008 that you wonder what's taking place. Do people at Microsoft talk to each other?
A similar rant goes to setting up a slideshow. For as long as iView and now Expression Media has been around, you'd think that someone would have made some simple additions for saving slideshow settings. Specifically, when you go to setup a slideshow, there are a variety of options from which to choose, as seen below. Sadly, but not surprisingly, there are no options to select music from iTunes. Regardless, the slideshow options are sticky for a saved database of images. What this means is that if you select just your images of Aunt Zelda and choose a specific transitions and all, if you now want to show your vacation in Italy images and wish to have different transitions, and scaling etc, you can't save those settings as a set to return to at a future time.
I used to be a big fan of iView but sadly, with all of the time that Microsoft has had this program, the lack of new features and lack of improvements to what is there is shockingly disappointing.
Meanwhile, the strengths of Expression (iView) are still there: storage of all of your images in a database format DAM so that if you take the limited amount of time to properly keyword your images, you can find your images of Aunt Zelda and/or your images of Fido faster than you can begin to think about it. You can observe and/or listen to any of your media (except HDR images, some RAW images, or any image that doesn't have a composite view pre-created).
On the other hand, if you wish and/or expect to see proper colors, corrected image colors, and accurate rendering of images, Expression Media will not fill your bill.
If you are a professional photographer or an amateur who uses Photoshop or even Photoshop Express as part of your tools, you already have Bridge. With Bridge, you do get accurate images at the expense of limited database functionality and slow response time as it builds images (albeit accurate images). Between the two, you can find your images quickly and see them accurately. Your call.
See other Microsoft Office 2008 product reviews.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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