I’ve had quite a few folks ask me recently about MetaSync. I suspect some of this is driven by the release of Office 2008 and the inclusion of Expression Media in the full package.
Funnily enough, I’ve been tinkering with MetaSync again after a long absence. Towards the end of 2007, I found myself growing dissatisfied with both Aperture and Lightroom in my current image workflow. There’s nothing that wrong with them per se, but I still use ACR in Photoshop CS3 for the bulk of my raw conversions. I did try using Lightroom for a while but I found it got really clunky when some images were offline. For big catalogs, it’s still really not an effective DAM tool at all.
The end result was that I found myself creeping back to iView MediaPro 3.1.3 - it’s not sexy but it doesn’t get in the way of my workflow, gracefully deals with offline media and is DNG-aware enough not to annoy me. It’s the least bad option, if you want to damn it with faint praise.
But of course, if I go back to MediaPro, I need to dust off my old workflow tools. One of the additions to Leopard was a scripting bridge to allow Applescript events to be generated simply from within Cocoa applications. This is an absolute plus for a tool like MetaSync, which relies on a lot of scripting to extract the metadata from MediaPro. MetaSync is currently an Applescript Studio application - adding more features than it currently has means that I either have to write a lot more Applescript (ugh) or write the new features in Cocoa and instantiate the whole thing from Applescript (bleah).
In Leopard, I get to re-write the whole thing in Cocoa. This is a Good Thing. My plan is to start working on MetaSync again fairly soon. Is there interest in making a version work with Expression Media? I can add this if there’s firm interest but I’m not going to write it on spec - I don’t use Expression Media yet (there’s nothing it does that I need).
Hi Scott-
I don’t know how many times MetaSync has saved the day when a photographer’s catalog full of RAWs needs to be synchronized with an editor’s catalog full of JPEGs. We’re still using iView 3 but when Expression Media starts to get new features we may switch. So yes, an enthusiastic yes to supporting MetaSync in Expression Media. Thanks for your work on the current MetaSync.
You don’t even need Leopard to send Apple events from ObjC - objc-appscript works on anything from Panther onwards:
http://appscript.sourceforge.net/objc-appscript.html
BTW, there’s one compatibility issue when dealing with iView MediaPro from appscript that may or may not have been fixed since it was reported a year or so ago. IMP’s scripting support contains a couple of obscure glitches in the way it packs and unpacks element index numbers that cause it to error if you pass it a previously returned reference. (I’ve no idea if Scripting Bridge is also affected, although it tends to be much more temperamental than appscript so I wouldn’t be surprised. AppleScript’s not affected as its own shortcomings happen to mask IMP’s.) Appscript’s highly customisable, however, so it’s easy enough to work around the problem if you do run into it.
HTH
has
http://appscript.sourceforge.net
http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org