For all you photographers out there I have come across a nice little application that might be of interest. First of all I want to say that I have no connection with any of the software I mention in this posting except that I am a happy user. It is, however, DEVONthinkPro that makes it so useful. I am using DEVONthink Pro Office (DVPO).
The Mac application is called ‘ContactPage’ which is produced by Badia Software, (contactpage.badiasoftware.com/) which simply put produces contact sheets for photographers. One of the things this is useful for is for cataloguing a photographic archive which can be exported in a number of formats including PDF which is ideal for either importing or indexing into DVPO. The way I have set it up is to save the ‘ContactPage’ as a PDF to a folder in my Documents folder and have DVPO index that folder. Then I can open the PDF in Skim and make personal notes on each individual image. It is worth saying that ‘ContactPage’ can be set up to include a lot of metadata in its preferences, it is up to the user to choose what is wanted in the finished contact sheet.
All this results in a nice archive of my photographs which I can easily access in DVPO for quick review as well as containing invaluable notes which, of course, can be anything from nothing to a brief description of how I was feeling or anything at all—all searchable in DVPO. It is the genius/power of DVPO that makes it so useful.
The screenshot is part of a contact sheet pdf I produced. The first notes under each image are the metadata I had ContactPage put in and the notes in the boxes are mine that I added in Skim. ‘ContactPage’ is very fast and it produced a contact sheet out of 1068 photographs in a matter of seconds. In future I intend making contact sheet for every shoot I do.
There are, no doubt, other ways of using the application in conjunction with DVPO and over time I will probably find some of them! I have not tried it with any other software but the developers claim it plays well with InDesign, QuarkXPress and Pages, (check the website first).
