This is a summary of my experience moving Cerious Software's ThumbsPlus (T+) meta-data to JRiver's Media Center (MC). Some background discussion can be found here
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=51370.0.
I began as a T+ user in March 2002. I chose T+ because I felt it had the most powerful image management features on the market. I have been a happy and strong advocate of T+ over the years.
My collection contains 15,300 family images (9000 digital camera images, 4800 scans of slides and prints, and 1500 video clips). Every image is accurately tagged with:
- Date (image was taken)
- Artist (who took the image)
- Quality (1-4)
- Keywords (max 15 keywords assigned to one image)
- Description (arbitrary text)
In addition, I have about 45 Galleries (aka Playlists) that I use for collections that are not amenable to a query and/or that need a manually specified sort order. Lastly, I have about 10 FoundFiles (aka Smartlists).
About a year ago I started thinking about moving my data from T+ to MC. My motivations were:
- T+ development had become dormant and I was concerned about marooning my data
- very high satisfaction with MC features and confidence that my data would be secure in MC
- desire to fully integrate all of my media (music, video, images, documents, audiobooks, dvds, etc.) under one roof
I explored many options for transferring the data. The best (and only feasible) approach was to export the data from T+'s underlying Access database into MPL (XML) format for import into MC. My Access programming skills are not strong enough to do this myself so I waited hoping for a new option. Recently a kind member on this forum offered to do the conversion for me.
In preparation, I opened the T+ database with Access and deleted all tables, fields, and queries except the image filename and my own data. This resulted in a dramatic size reduction from 125MB to 4.5MB. The final database consisted of one table with path, filename, date, artist, quality, description; a second table for keywords; and a third table for playlists. I emailed this to my helper and he emailed me back one MPL file (containing the meta-data) plus 45 M3U files (one for each of my Playlists). I do not know how the conversion was accomplished but I suspect one tricky bit was figuring out how to convert the relational keywords into a flat list of delimited keywords.
I then finalized the mapping between T+ fields and MC fields and did a find and replace on the MPL to adjust the field names before importing into MC. The import worked flawlessly the first time and was very quick.
I then did some spot checks on the data and found a few minor problems, presumably caused by some max string length being exceed in the conversion process. These were easy to correct.
I then imported each of the 45 M3U's and manually created Playlist Groups to re-establish the original Gallery hierarchy.
Next, I manually created Smartlists to mimic my T+ FoundFiles.
Finally, I designed a new view scheme to take advantage of the meta-data, and using this view I methodically checked every Artist and every Keyword to ensure my MC library was accurately synchronized with my T+ database. It was, perfectly.
I am VERY pleased with the final results. MC is superb for navigating, searching, and manipulating meta-data. My image collection feels like it has new vitality because it is so easy and quick to find and view things.
In addition, I love having all of my media fully integrated under one roof. For example, I create A/V presentations for family and friends from time to time. These presentations include music, still images, and video. I can now find and sequence these assets using MC before exporting the files for dvd production in another tool. When done I can import the dvd into MC as well as my project design documents. All of the assets plus the final dvd and documents can be nicely organized under one MC playlist group.
For anyone contemplating a switch to MC for their image collection, I heartily recommend it. You will be very pleased with the results.
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Topic: ThumbsPlus to JRiver - my experience (Read 2806 times)