Extensis Portfolio has been called the Cadillac of file management programs. While there are other programs that have some of the features of Portfolio (such as iView and ACDSee), none of them can do as much, or with as much depth as can be done with Portfolio.

However, while Portfolio can be considered the Cadillac of file management programs, you must be willing to accept manual transmission instead of an automatic. Simply put, there's more work involved in running Portfolio, but it's (mostly) worth it.

On a side, but important issue, the Portfolio reviewed here was done in Classic. Extensis chose to go ahead and release the OS 9 and Windows version as opposed to holding up everything and waiting for the OS X version to be completed. Once the OS X version is released, it will be a free upgrade to all registered Portfolio 6 users. For those interested, you can download an Alpha version of the OS X version here. You do not need to own version 6 to download this release, but it does have a built-in short life span. (There is also a demo version of the released version of Portfolio on the regular web site.)

Back to the review...

At its face level, Portfolio lets you see thumbnails of your photos. Double-click a photo and you can see a larger image of your picture. You can present a slideshow and/or save a collection as a QuickTime movie, and/or save a collection in a series of web pages with thumbnails linking to full size images. And, by supplying your photos with keywords, you can find pretty much any photo(s) amazingly fast. And, (but not least) all this can be done over a server, so if you have a company and wish to place all your photos on the main server, all the people in the company have access to the photos via Portfolio. More on all of this later.

The key aspect of Portfolio that one must focus on is that overall, it is a database of one's media. As a database, it can contain ALL YOUR FILES. Where the material is located is, for the most part, secondary--your media can be on your hard drive or on removeable media. But, as a database, when you do a search for "California," every item that has California in that field will be found. Now that you have that "found set,' you can display or examine each part of that found set as desired.

When performing a search in Portfolio, you have total control as the searches are fully Boolean and you can have as many levels of search as you wish.

The one extra level available with Portfolio is that you can save a particular found set as a Catalog so that in the future one can bring up the catalog of "California" as opposed to having to find it each time. A catalog is nothing more than a specific "found set." A catalog can contain any number of catalogs of such collections. While you can find a "found set" of California instantly, you may have some photos with California as Keywords that you may not be interested in. For example, if you have family in California, but want to look at California vacations, you may wish to create a sub-catalog of California vacation photos which will have already had the California family photos weeded out.

On a media note, if you take photos with your camera, then bring them into Photoshop for alterations, then make web photos and thumbnails from those alterations, you can keep each one of those in their own catalog. To try and explain this a bit better, I've got all my photos in one catalog (almost 2500 at the time of this writing), but I've got some 20 defined catalogs within of specific found sets. (By the way, the term "found set" is mine, a holdover of my working with FileMaker Pro.)

When starting Portfolio for the first time you must either create a new "Catalogue," or open an old one. Personally, I think the term "Collection" as the initial storage location would have been a better word choice. There are a variety of ways to get your files into the catalogue, but dragging the folder from the Finder into the catalogue window is an easy one. New with version 6 is FolderSync which also provides another easy way to get your photos into Portfolio. (More on FolderSync later)

Once getting your photos into Portfolio, the program must create thumbnails and catalog them. This is not necessarily fast and if you are doing several hundred, go have a cup of coffee, several thousand and go have lunch or dinner.

Like most people, I have my photos separated into folders: some for the family, some for the dogs, some for vacations, etc. When you place your photos into Portfolio, they are now "all together." A couple of thousand photos all together? What a mess? Well, not really.

As mentioned, one of the features/tools of Portfolio is the keyword index used to find what you have. Extensis has provided an amazing assortment of techniques to create the keywords. One of the slickest approaches of adding keywords is via the folder(s) containing your photos. Thus, if you placed 30 photos in a folder called "untitled folder," and then dragged that folder into Portfolio, you would now have 30 photos that have "untitled," "folder," and "untitled folder" as keywords. As such it would be kind of a PIA, but if you have a folder called Vacations and inside this folder you have another folder called "2002 Hawaii," and if you have identified each photo with the people, places, and/or things in each photo, then when these items are brought into Portfolio, you're probably done.

To provide more than enough options, Extensis offers over 8 different mechanisms to add keywords to your photos.

• Creating Keywords from Path (as mentioned above).
• Keywords during cataloging. Here you select the "Cataloging Options" window (Catalog -> Cataloging Options..."). This feature only works when you are in the process of cataloging items and does not work after the items have been cataloged.

Please note you cannot add words to your Keyword list from this window. If you want to add words to a photos Keyword list, you must go into Item (menu) -> "Edit Keywords..." to access the ability to add new Keywords. Then you can use the above window to assign such Keywords to selected files. If you want to add words to your Master Keyword list, you must go into Catalog ->Administrator and select the Keywords tab. If Catalog ->Administrator is greyed out, you need to go into Catalog -> Access and verify that it is set at the Administrator on the Pop-up selection. If a password has been set, be sure that you know that password.

• The Item Properties Window. Here, you can look at each photo individually and assign keywords on a one-on-one basis. The window looks just like the window above, but is not to be used during cataloging.
• Use Record View. One of the three options to view your files is the Record View. It lets you look at each one and see specifically what keywords have been assigned as well as fields you have created for it and a few other specific items. You can add keywords directly to photos from here (you type it in and then click the "+" button), but curiously the ability to do so is turned off by default and you must manually turn this feature on to have such access.

Keywording with the Edit Field Value. This very powerful tool (new with version 6) lets you "Add," "Delete," "Delete All," or "Replace" one keyword (or description) with a selected set. [This last point in important, because if you do a Keyword search and find a bunch of files, and attempt to add a new keyword to that found set, nothing will happen. You must select all the images you want to apply the new Keyword(s) to. Selection can be done either by clicking on the first in a group and Shift-clicking on the last of a series, marquise the whole lot you wish to select and/or Command-clicking if the items are not sequential.]
Use the Master Keyword Palette. This nifty tool, obtained by going to the Window (menu) and selecting Master Keywords, lets you apply (or assign) Keywords to selected photos (via the techniques described above) by clicking on the Keyword once and then clicking on the "Assign" button. If you click once and then click on the "Find" button, or double-click the word, all the photos with that Keyword will be summand.
Drag and Drop Text. Here is where SimpleText, TextEdit, or even MS Word can be used for inputing Keywords. In this case, if you have a window of one of these Drag and Drop enabled programs open on the Desktop, type in the desired Keyword, and drag it upon the (pre) selected files. Zap, you've just added Keywords to those files.
Use the Edit Keywords Command. After selecting the file(s) you wish to add keywords to, you go to the Item menu and select "Edit Keywords" to get the window seen on the right. You type your Keyword(s) in the top field and click on the Add button, Once you have added all the extra Keywords you wish, you click the OK button and the new Keywords will be added to your images. Unfortunately, if you only have one Keyword to add, you still have to click on the Add button and then the OK button.

I found part of Portfolio's operation somewhat clumsy. For example, if you are in Record view and assign a Keyword to some photo(s), you need to click into (say) Thumbnail view and back into Record view for Keywords to show up on the screen.

Another quirk (or in this case a design decision), if you go into Record view and want to see a full list of images on the screen, you need to go into View -> Customize...->[Record] tab and click on "Display as List." You can see the difference below with the default view on the left and the list view on the right:

Meanwhile, as long as you are in this area, you may want to also click on "Edit" selection (to add Keywords on a one-on-one basis). (Notice that the right side of the above screenshot of the Record view does not show the add [+] or delete [-] buttons for Keywords as opposed to the screen shot of Record view in the discussion of Keywords which does show them.) If you click on OK at this point you're fine UNTIL you re-open Portfolio the next time where you find all your selections gone. That is, unless you also clicked on the [Save as Default] button on the bottom of the Customize... window. It seems to me that if I want to be able to do something and/or see something, that's the way I want it. Why should I have to do something extra to have it set that way?

In short, Portfolio is a wonderful, great program that needs tighter integration. While I am giving Extensis Portfolio a 4 "A" rating, it is a high 4. It could easily have been a 5 were it not for the program's "designed by committee" approach and the extra actions that one must take to do operations that should be simpler to perform. For example, Portfolio can show Tag Codes for Photoshop, IPTC, TIF, and EXIF data. But this is dreadfully implemented, only allowing such information to show up in defined fields and only on newly imported photos. I could not find any mechanism on how to display this data for already imported photos.

As far as features go, I have only scratched the surface in this review of what this program can do: consider that it has server capabilities, strong outputting features, access levels (Administrator, Publisher, Editor, and Reader), password protection, Express Palette (new to 6) for fast access to photos along with Drag & Drop into other programs, etc. Portfolio's features goes on and on.

Their web site has 30 day demos available, and if you are using OS X, get the Alpha (it's an open test right now) and play. Despite its flaws, if you have more than several hundred photos you ought to consider it and if you have thousands and thousands of photos (and variations on those photos), it's a must-have program.

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