It is a crying shame that this app was sold to M$. This was my favorite media cataloguer, but now that it is a M$ product, I don't want it on my disk (you might think that's childish, but if you, like me, have had to endure about 20 years of hell using M$ products, you would understand).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to a replacement?

I am using iPhoto to catalog my photos, but I really hate iPhoto; it is bloated, slow and buggy (boo to Apple! There was a time when you wrote good software…). Also, it only does photos, no other type of media, and I cannot save individual catalogs (such as all the media available for a certain project).

This has been the best cataloguer I have used. Portfolio was always a PITA with every version "upgrade". iView has generally been clean and fast and reliable.

I do not use it on overall collections but set up logical collections then create .pdfs of the lightboxes and add those to the collections. Those are what I search and narrow my choices. I work this way as painfully tagging everything and putting them in large searchable collections leads to ultimate disappointment when those catalogs break for various reasons or get abandoned by the developer.

However any CS4 ai files cause it to crash which is a real shame because my preferred format is CS4 ai files with .pdf previews.

Does anyone have any better cataloguers or archiving methods to suggest?

I've used the "Pro" version 2.6.2 for some 10 days now, and I've imported a few thousand pictures into it, including Canon and Nikon RAW images. I really like the concept of hierarcical sets for organizing images. I have created a few slide shows and some web pages; I especially like the look of the latter.

I am happy with the program so far, and would recommend it for Mac users, though it seems a bit pricey to its PC equivalent, iMatch (at $50; see qubbles, below).

Quibbles I have:
- There's no way to build a hierarchy of, say, locations (e.g., USA/national parks/yosemite), even though you _can_ do this with "catalog sets". In fact, catalog sets are a nice generalization of all the other classification tools, so why not go all the way and make the full power available everywhere?
- I haven't used iMatch on a PC (sounds very similar to iView, just better), but I'd love to have some of its features: "dynamic sets" (set union/intersection etc., computed on the fly), better scripting, database export to ASCII, ability to assign multiple "canned" classifications at once to multiple images in a single move, support for removable media. None of these should be hard to add; the basics are all there.
- major annoyance: PhotoshopCS uses "DateTime" and "DateTimeOriginal" EXIF annotations; most of the time you'd want the latter (when the pic was first shot, not when you last tweaked it), but iView doesn't seem to know about it. Minimally, there'd be an option for you to pick what iView should use on import. (I've found myself spending half my cataloging time on fixing the darn date.)
- for movie and sound clips from an old PowerSnot S40, iView seems to have no clue what the real date/time is; I haven't investigated yet whether that's a problem with the S40 or iView.
- there should be a way to keep image files and their sound annotations together.

Quibbles aside, this is a very nice and fast program. I think any media cataloging program that does _not_ support hierarchical sets (and that includes some rather pricey ones) cannot even aspire to be in the same league.

Four stars on all but "value"; I'll give them five once they are as feature-rich as iMatch (if the latter weren't PC-only, I'd use that instead of iView).

Good app. Nice for organizing all those pictures of my favorite TV series and films.

If you really have to pay money for an app like this, you'd rather spend it on Q Media Manager

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/7716

Definitely better and cheaper.

Also if you just want something to quickly browser folders with images. GraphicConverter is pretty quick and good at that and can convert into some hundred image formats.