What is Portfolio? Portfolio is a digital media file management package, designed to help you manage your photo, video, and audio files. To quote the manual, Portfolio "takes over the grunt work involved in getting you organized" and it "ends the chaos of naming, tracking, and accessing digital files."

With Portfolio, you can create collections of pictures and other media files; preview them; burn them to optical disks; create slide shows; and share them on a web site. You can embed and edit metadata (such as the date a photo was taken). Portfolio allows you to locate individual files anywhere on your system simply by typing a key word or phrase. Portfolio handles all the modern digital media formats, including video formats and Adobe's new .DNG format. Portfolio can integrate with Adobe's CS2 applications. For media artists who work with large collections of media files, Portfolio also has an additional cost option to set up a server for sharing catalogs. This feature requires a separate computer; I have not tested it.

Installation and setup: Installing Portfolio was easy, although it required a reboot. My initial plan was to use Portfolio to catalog the contents of my external disk drive. I began that process on Christmas Day. Portfolio displays a status window as it builds a catalog, so I watched that status window for a bit, then I put it in the background. Believe it or not, one week later, the cataloging process was still running and it was up to around 150,000 files! I would have allowed it to run longer; however, I had to shut down to leave for a trip.

When I returned to Portfolio, it had no problem showing me the catalog it created, and it was huge! Way too large for me to manage, so I deleted it and I created a much more modest catalog a single folder. This time it took only a few seconds. As I get more facile with the software, I will add items to my catalog

Using Portfolio: Once you create a catalog, you can search it for files, list out files, and open files within that catalog in several different ways. For example, to preview a cataloged photo and show its metadata (e.g., date, time, camera settings, etc.), double-click on it.

As you build a catalog or add files to an existing catalog, Portfolio generates a list of relevant keywords based on what it knows about each file. For example, my catalog was built from images that I stored in a folder called "Cooper River Flood" so all the images in that folder were automatically tagged with the keywords "Cooper," "River," and "Flood" which makes searching for photos easy.

When you preview an item, you can get info on it to see all of its keywords and metadata. You can also modify the metadata and add comments.

So what can you do with a catalog? To edit a photo, instead of double-clicking on it, you just drag it onto the icon of your favorite photo editor. The process is simple; however, it would be nice to have an option where double-clicking it would open it instead of previewing it.

What Portfolio is not: All in all, I am very impressed with this application. It is a professional-level digital asset manager with a lot of features. So, learning to use Portfolio effectively takes a little while, even though its controls and options are nicely laid out. For the casual photographer, Portfolio is overkill; iPhoto would be fine.

Portfolio is also not a photo-editing package like iPhoto, Aperture, or Photoshop, and it has a lot more features than Adobe's Bridge program. For digital photographers who maintain a large collection of images, Portfolio can help you reign in an unwieldy photo collection.

My biggest gripe with Portfolio is that it does not tell you how long a cataloging process will take, not even a rough estimate. If I had had any clue that creating a catalog of my entire photo collection would take more than a week, I would have known right away to scale back that attempt.