Kirk,
Some Catalog questions so I know what I will have to ask of management at our newspaper....
Will Catalog work for machines on a LAN that do not have photo mechanic? We have two users (me and our other photog) using photo mechanic while three sports and six news people sadly do not use photo mechanic and often need to find photos (mostly located on a photo server machine). If a copy of Catalog is located on the Photo Server Machine, will it be able to track images on the Photo server, and images on each photographer's machine and images on a second server that is used for production temp storage of images? And will non-Photo Mechanic machines be able to access Catalog and find images? Would their access of Catalog allow them to see images visually (as opposed to seeing only image filenames) so they could then choose the image they are looking for?
Or would we need nine more copies of Photo Mechanic or 12 licenses of Catalog in order for everyone to find images?
Also, if PM is required to access Catalog, will PM 5 be the only version that does so? I'll be buying Catalog along with PM 5 upgrade the day it launches for my personal machines, but our two company computers are still limited to 4.4.3.3 due to lack of budget.
My hope is that one Catalog license can find and track all images across multiple machines and server in a single building, and allow both Photo Mechanic users and machines without photo mechanic to access some form of search that allows keyword/slug/partial caption searches and returns visual representations of found files (so that a search for "AU #16 FB" returns visual results that a sports editor can then say "I like that one of #16 making a catch, and besides that the other image is #16 from six years ago"). Will Catalog do all this from one copy? Or will I have to convince management to but lots of Catalog or Photo Mechanic Licenses? (I'd love to get them all working on PM at some point but budgets are thin).
Thanks for your always excellent support Kirk!