Aldus Fetch

[zimwhatzim]

I snagged the wrong software on E-Bay, I thought it was something else. I understand what Aldus Fetch does from the description, but does anyone have experience using it? It actually seems like it would be a neat piece of software. I wanted to use my ci for photos and video (in a limited fashion of course), and Fetch seems to be a great way to organize things. So, opinions from folks that have used it? Thanks!

 

[Cory5412]

Was Fetch the primordial digital asset management app?

If so: I've long been meaning to. Photography is one of the things that drove most, if not all, of my performance upgrades over the years, and I've started to slowly accumulate vintage Mac digital imaging gear.

I've briefly gandered through the trial, but I never had my own collection of digital images (or at least nothing it made sense to use such an app for.)

Sort of relatedly...

When I was doing photography in CS1/CS2 on my Pismo (because both the Pismo and the TiBook were really too slow for the super complicated task of "looking at photos" what I did was used Adobe Bridge to rename all of my incoming photos [lastname]_yyyy-mm-dd_cameraoutputnumber.extension and then manually sort them into folders of 36. After that, I'd select the folder in Bridge and tell it to use Photoshop's contact sheet extension. (Interestingly, InDesign had this too, but I always thought Photoshop did it better, even though it was a little harder on the machine to batch up a contact sheet with Photoshop.)

Anyway, then I'd print out the sheet on my 4/600PS and save a copy of it just in case. Then, I'd put all the sheets in a binder and refer to that if I needed to find a particular image. I'd basically know right where the image was on my disk, be able to pull it up and do whatever I needed with it. I used sticky notes in the book to keep track of things I wanted to do to the images.

What times.

iPhoto was pretty slow and unreliable (at least for me) at the time and although Aperture existed, it barely (unofficially at that) ran on my TiBook, so this system, though tedious, ended up being a little better.

I later adapted a better version of this system based on what I learned in one of my courses, but instead of 36 images per folder, it was "about 4 gigs" per folder, and the overall structure was just a little different. I later just gave up and put everything in Lightroom, because I have a computer fast enough to do that now. (Also, Lightroom began existing, which helped things along.)

 

[zimwhatzim]

iphoto was always a pile of....you know, on my systems. Even through Intel CPU's. Ugh. 

Well, once I get a CD-ROM for my ci I'll develop some content and post it here, as in videos or whatever

 

[Cory5412]

yeah, it'd be interesting to see some screenshots or perhaps a screencast of it in action, if you've got a way to record the video out or a good camera to point at the system. (mmmmh, something I should try at some point.)

The reminder of tools like ALdus Fetch is intriguing though, because I have started building a collection of old digital cameras, it would be neat to have some tools on the 840 or similar to sort through those images.

On the NeXT systems, there's a photo management/viewing application, I need to look at that and see what NeXTs are like in networked Mac environments, either as servers or clients. That's mostly unrelated though.

iPhoto worked well until it didn't. Photos is a little better today, but I haven't tried dropping a bunch of RAWs out of one of my better cameras onto it. While it was still available, I liked Aperture a lot better. It was probably the thing I missed most when I switched to Windows on my primary modern systems, and was for a few years the thing that made me most tempted to get a (more powerful, modern) Mac again.

At this point, I'm using Lightroom.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have fetch, never used it since I don't do photography much. Would it work for scans as well?

 

[zimwhatzim]

I haven't popped the seal on the box, so I don't have the manual in front of me. From what I gather it works with pretty much any media of the day, but if / when I find out more I'll post.