Archiving the (family) photos on OS 9

[Bolkonskij]

Would be happy to hear from folks how they deal with their photos (and videos, possibly?) ? I have a bunch of family photos that are still sitting in their original resolution in a folder on an external firewire harddisk. Most are just JPG files. A lot of them are from the time when the kids were infants or in kindergarden and I definitely want to keep them and possibly have them easily accessible.

I used to have them stored in iPhoto back when Apple was still supporting it on PPC OSX but found the program somewhat lacking already back then. In short, I never really liked it and got them all extracted in original size onto the external HDD.

I'm interested in a solution for Mac OS 9 that allows me to keep track of them, categorize them and comfortably view them - and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I do have iView Multimedia (3.8.1) installed which I had started to import stuff into, but I'm still wondering if that's really the best solution and what my workflow should be like. So I turn to you with a request for advice :-)

Someone else using iView Multimedia?
Or are you using another software?
What does your workflow look like?
Do you use a batch resizer to get modern 3000x4000px images down to something that OS 9 feels more comfy with or leave the originals as they are?
Any experience as for how many photos iView Multimedia is able to cope with until it gets real slow? (I'm on a 1,42 Ghz Mini)

Any input appreciated!

[ssp3]

When it comes to stills - iView MediaPro.
IIRC, the trick was to use version prior to v.2, because starting with version 2 it became slow.
I personally used version 1.0.4, which, I think, was 7.6.1 compatible.
I have a fiend, a graphic designer, who used iView MediaPro to catalog all his clip art collections. The tip about the speed came from him. Also, his wife produced full memory card almost daily with her, then new, digital camera. They used iView MediaPro to sort and catalog that stuff as well. I've observed that process on several occasions.
I think you'll be fine if you go with it. As to the videos - I have no idea.

[Mat]

The professional program for your needs is "Cumulus". Evolving from a picture database is was already at Mac OS 7 times promoted as programm for "digital assets". So it can catalog, sort, group, create small preview pictures, etc. for any kind of data. There were even workgroup editions for mixed networks.

Another option would be "ACDsee".

Also of interrest (including various movie options) is "Olympus Camedia Master", but I never used it myselv. Last version seems to be 4.2 and there were also "Pro" versions.

And finally there was a damn fast freeware, that blew away all other programs in displaying the thumbnails by factor 5 or something. But just for photos, and sadly I cannot remember the name right now and it is just at my broken Pismos HD, … :-/

[robespierre]

Olympus Camedia Master is required to connect to old Olympus digital cameras, when you do not have any card reader compatible with the card format. The old cameras, like the C-2020Z, used serial ports to connect to the host to download pictures, which meant a proprietary application was required to talk to them. Otherwise there is certainly no reason to use this slow and buggy software.

Graphic Converter from lemkesoft has a picture browser and can be used to sort or file pictures. Since it's also a full image editing program, you can make batch conversion scripts and apply them to images you select in the browser.