iMatch – another media management system

In a comment, I once again came across “iMatch”, an image management program that is made in Germany and has been in development for several decades. I tried out the program four years ago and put it aside relatively quickly.

This time I let the program loose on 8TB images – just for starters – and during the 24-hour experiment I wrote down what I noticed.

• The software license is in English.
• But you can choose the interface language and you can also choose where you want to have your database during installation. You can even specify a password for the database.
• There is only online help for this and it is also in English.
• If you have the German interface, you get English “tips on the program”.
• Adding images to the database failed for me with 194125 files. Bang. Crash. Restart the program, at least the database is there and the program starts importing metadata. The program needs a good eight hours for 230,000 files. When you think, great, now it’s done. Think again. It continues with “Add and update” – another 12 hours. And then you should optimize the freshly created database. Another half an hour.
• Then you can start looking in the database.

20 hours to import 200,000 images? Yes OK, you can live with that. You only have to do it once. How does the program behave in operation?

Really cool: iMatch analyzes the Picasa nametags and displays the faces and names. It has even extracted the Picasa people list from the tags.

Olympus Makernotes are evaluated, which means you can also see parameters that other programs do not display.

Less cool: You can sort the images according to various parameters. For example, by file name, similarity, size – and also by “similar faces” – which completely fails. You can even edit the images. Slap some funny shapes with text on them onto the pictures. Even in several layers. .

The user interface is completely overloaded. Literally dozens of windows, thousands of options, some of the icons have tool tips, some you can only guess or try out. If you have a large image while editing and think you can zoom in with the scroll wheel – no, you switch images with the scroll wheel. You can customize the user interface, but you first have to know what you absolutely need and what you can do without.

The program is incredibly fast. It really is. And once you’ve figured out how to start a search, it works really quickly – I understood how to make a filter, but not how to activate the filter.

Another great thing is that you can also manage pretty much all other media in iMatch and use it to put together projects from different types of media. For example, managing a band with band photos, MP3 files and image videos. Cool.

If you fight your way through the English instructions and invest two weeks in iMatch digging through all the media NAS, then you have a really powerful database that can do quite a lot. You should just edit the images with an external program.

The program costs 130 euros, there is a fully functional 30-day license and it is a really good idea for people for whom Excire is not comprehensive enough and who can’t do anything with Excire’s natural language search.

With the 200,000 images, iMatch has created an 8GB database for me, which is rather on the lower end of corresponding databases in other programs. So everything is OK.

You can have a look.

I uninstalled it again after 24 hours – the database is not deleted, you have to get rid of it manually. So if iMatch specialists want to explain to me what I did wrong – hopeless. I no longer have it on my computer.

The cover picture? That’s what Excire suggested to me after I entered the blog post title in the plain text search.