slowness viewing RAW files with iView/EM, your thoughts?

[adamtanner]

I just got back from a European trip on which I took around 2000 shots of Nikon NEF RAW files.

I've used iView for years and it has always been a great organizational tool, but has always been extremely *painful* to use to sort through/organize RAW files. I had hoped that with the upgrade to the Expression 2 version of the application that some of that would be alleviated, but I get the feeling I am wrong.

I also own Aperture 2.1 and Lightroom 1.4x and on a whim after this last trip, I imported the 2000 or so RAW files into both of them and voila, they render and you can view RAW files quickly and smoothly and easily move from one image to the next almost instantly (once their importing/thumbnailing is done). I wondered why I still put up with the painful amount of time it takes to move between RAW files in Iview/Expression's light table and the image viewing panes.

I'm on a 2.4ghz iMac with 2gb of RAM and wonder if anyone else has gotten fed up with how slow this wonderful organizational application is when working with RAW files.

Obviously both LR and Aperture have their pros/cons, but I was able to sort through 2000 RAW files in Aperture in a day or so, tagging, rating, creating albums of better images, all of which would have taken me a week in Expression/IView with how slow it moves between RAW files when in the Light Table and such.

Is anyone at Microsoft listening or watching what its competition can do, or is this application destined to be the iPhoto of the Microsoft world? (ie a good app, that just doesn't cut it for a pro/prosumer, and is only used because it's included in Office 2008)

I really would rather not move 10 years worth of iView catalogs over to Aperture or Lightroom, but I'm beginning to think that I'm one of the last photographers on a sinking ship with Expression/IView. Please tell me I'm wrong.

Thanks,
Adam

[scottbuckel]

Adam, many of us use a combination of tools. I routinely sort and edit my raw files in lightroom and like many of lightrooms features. I edit, rate, sync annotations in lightroom then I convert to dng and import the dng's into EM.

I think EM has better tools for finding my files.

Scott
_________________
Scott Buckel
Monrovia, CA

[adamtanner]

well, i've since pretty much moved into lightroom.. as the painfully slow raw file viewing in EM/IVMP is just unusable for me..



does anyone have any suggestions about how to migrate keywords in EM/IVMP into another applications?

[AlainC]

I use Lightroom and iView, the solution is to convert RAW into DNG. It solves the performance problem of iView and allows easy tranfer of metadata.

[Peter Long]

I also use DNG and see no speed issues vs JPGs.