IMatch

IMatch

250px IMatch 5
Developer(s)	Mario M. Westphal
Stable release	5.5.8 / December 17, 2015 (2015-12-17)
Operating system	Windows
Type	Digital asset management
License	Proprietary
Website	http://www.photools.com/

IMatch (IMatch Digital Asset Management system) is a shareware digital asset management application for Microsoft Windows compatible computers.

IMatch provides tools for organizing, finding, viewing, presenting, processing and converting images, music, videos, PDF and Office documents and all other digital files. It will cope readily with collections numbering hundreds of thousands of items. Typical IMatch users include professional photographers, advanced amateur photographers, librarians, musicians and genealogy researchers.

Features

• IMatch's flexibility and functionality is based on an internal, high-performance database. During an initial 'importing' phase, IMatch extracts metadata and other information from the files to be managed. It builds and maintains an index of all related information on the files and then offers multiple simultaneous 'views' into the data using resizeable 'window panels'. Different panel layouts can in turn be arranged and saved as workspaces for particular contexts.
• The IMatch built-in Help system is extensive and thorough, with context-sensitive Help and tooltips available for almost every aspect of the program's operation.
• IMatch has built-in support for many different file types and it operates on the files without needing any change to their stored locations.
• IMatch is able to read and to maintain Exif, IPTC, XMP and geographic/GPS data in digital images and is therefore well suited for photography workflows that are based on raw image formats.
• IMatch has been designed to accord with recent metadata standards such as those from the The Metadata Working Group, while still allowing a great deal of user-choice and flexibility in the broader use of the stored metadata.
• IMatch is fully color managed. Beginning with IMatch version 5.5 the program takes advantage of the host computer's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to give state of the art rendering and zooming of full-size images in the program's dedicated image viewer, and to allow rapid previewing and browsing through selected image sets. An additional, versatile slide-show function is enhanced by the same GPU streamlining.
• A Design & Print module was introduced in IMatch version 5.5. The Design & Print module enables the creation of template-based, composite documents such as photo books, contact sheets and portfolios. The images to be inserted in a Design & Print layout can be selected using IMatch Categories or can be dynamically selected using expressions and variables from IMatch's scripting libraries. Likewise, image metadata can be inserted into document designs.
• IMatch incorporates the Lite edition of Juicebox to allow selected images to be exported as web-ready galleries. The galleries use HTML5 and JavaScript and hence are platform independent.
• Many internal functions and data-display elements of the program can be enhanced, modified and supplemented using the IMatch (scripting) Object Model. A scripting editor and IDE are included.
• IMatch scripting can be combined with HTML, CSS and a (custom) JavaScript Library to create new applications (Apps) which run within the program's App Panel. A number of fully documented sample Apps are provided.
• The IMatch (scripting) Object Model is both event driven and data driven, and a full set of programming classes (for example a Metadata Class) are included, along with comprehensive documentation, thereby giving script-based access to almost all objects and contents in an IMatch database.

See also

• Comparison of image viewers
• Image organizer
• Digital Asset Management

External links

• Official website
• The IMatch/Photools Community forum
• A Review of IMatch 5 and its Role in Social Science Research, by the consultant, reseacher, and writer R.P. Ambrosi PhD
• The Metadata Working Group
• (Refers to an earlier version of IMatch) Image category management with IMatch, Fazal Majid.
• (Refers to an earlier version of IMatch) IMatch review, Nick Rains. "I have only looked at the easy stuff but you could make Imatch into a very powerful search tool with collections into the hundreds of thousands"
• The Juicebox HTML5 image gallery creation tool.