image management
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AtomicView: UI bomb
AtomicView bills itself as a super-efficient multimedia manager with an interface that "combines elegance and sobriety." When I first loaded it up, I was frustrated enough with its almost total disregard for consistent UI design and controls to swear it off for a week. I've given it another run and moved its rank up to tolerable. It does have enough pros to level out its cons, and we can call it a wash. I'm bothering to mention it here for two reasons: we've had some enthusiastic reports and some of you may find it useful as a middle-of-the-road solution between iPhoto and something more robust like Aperture or Bridge. At 95 Euros (about $150), it doesn't come in much cheaper than the $199 Aperture 2. But it does handle more file types and if your needs are a little broader than just photography, it's a viable alternative. It lacks some of the sorting features common to other programs, but it allows for grouping, advanced boolean searching of metadata with smart folder capabilities and full screen navigation/preview with multi-monitor support. Here's the thing about the boolean search, though: as far as I can tell, there's no universal search. I can't type "pants" and pull up every item that has "pants" in any of its metadata. I have to build a search one line at a time, looking through each field of each metadata type for my keyword.
