iView Media Pro 3.0 was announced today. The timing of all these photo announcements is not strange, since the Photo Expo is going on this week in New York. Nevertheless, it’s always possible that they rushed their announcement following Aperture’s debut. Aside from the press release, there’s little additional information on the website detailing the refined user interface, the lightbox feature, etc.
The price of iView has been creeping up over the years. I seem to recall the price of the digital asset management application being under $100 when I first purchased it. Since then, the price has increased to its current $199 point. iView Media Pro does handle a whole range of media formats. It’s undetermined right now how Aperture deals, if at all, with video, text, or other medial files aside from TIFF, PSD, JPEG, or RAW.
I’ve used iView Media Pro to catalog and annotate my entire image collection of 70,000+ images. Despite that, I’m not wedding to using iView in the future. My current plan is to test out Aperture to see if it can replace iView and CaptureOne as my day-to-day image catalog and RAW processor. If that’s the case, we’ll be seeing an updated workflow post from me in the near future!
An article in MacCentral points to more details about Aperture. Some highlights include:
- By the way, there’s no Save command in Aperture. As you make changes, those changes are recorded in a SQL database.
- One note about the movement between the two apps: When you move to Photoshop, Aperture exports a version of the image with all of your current effects applied. If you reimport the Photoshop-edited file back into Aperture, it’s like starting from scratch. The program creates a new digital negative and works from there. You can’t jump back and change any Aperture settings you made before going Photoshop without also losing any of the changes you made in Photoshop. So you lose some of the benefit of the non-destructive editing every time you make the leap.
- It sounds as though Aperture will resemble its distant iPhoto cousin in at least one way: how you manage your files—or rather don’t manage them. Like iPhoto, Aperture organizes and tracks your files for you. I haven’t seen what the file system looks like at the back end (iPhoto annoyingly sorts its files by date). But Aperture’s interface appears to group files into projects that you define.
tow.com 
I’ve been using the iViewMedia/CaptureOne combo for Mac for a few monhs now and my workflow works out okay. CaptureOne is slow on a G4 Powerbook. Aperture looks promising but it requres an expensive hardware upgrade.
I’m curious, do you keep one iViewMedia database with all 70,000 images? My collection is approximately 8,000 images (32 GB) and it was been working just fine; I am concern that as the database grows it will slow down.
No, I separate catalogs by Year-Month. As a result, I have about 84 catalogs covering 7 years of data. This makes it slow for searching for items between catalogs, which is one reason I’m interested in Aperture. The largest number of images in any one catalog is probably 4000 images. I have found that iView gets slow with large image databases, especially if the images have been annotated. Your mileage may vary!