11/05/2005

iViewMedia Pro Vers. 3

Finally had a chance to launch iView Media Pro 3. Guess what? Mikey likes it. If nothing else it has a way to FTP to your site when you're done (which is not such a big deal) but finally - you can tell it to SKIP the image files that it hasn't touched. Before, if I made changes to an HTML gallery, I would then go into Dreamweaver, and unless I had added some images, I would just manually upload the changed files (the media page and the index pages).

The only down thing is that Media Pro in the gallery building stage, still seems to want to re-make the jpgs, i.e. when it's done I checked the timestamp of the jpgs and they had been updated. I'm not sure why it wants to do this all the time or if there is a way around it (probably is - I just haven't tripped over it).

Still - that it knows which Image files don't need to be re-uploaded is a big deal.

One other quibble - so far. You could always save certain preferences for each gallery in the settings tab. However - and this seems stupid - it doesn't associate the ftp gallery to load to with your settings. In other words - if you have several galleries - make sure you change where they're going in the ftp settings. They also changed the gallery directory structure slightly. So for example if I were to republish the blog gallery - some images from the blog are going to have to be repointed.

As far as any conversion problems: none so far. Just opened the old version 2 catalogs and everything was as it was - though they have added a much better user-interface for the catalog sets.

There are several sections that relate to gallery building that are new - but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet; but at this point I'll take the shortcut to version II off the desktop and continue using vers. III.

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