Once you've downloaded and installed Media Pro it's time to make the first catalogue
you want to decide where you want to save these
so that you know where all of your catalogs are
I suggest using a folder for works in progress
and inside that
making a folder
for your catalogs
you should start with one single catalog
and only divide your catalog up into
additional catalogs as the need presents
now that we have a folder to save this into
let's launch the application and make our first catalogue
I launched the application by finding it in the applications folder
and double click the launch
you'll be asked at this point to either run it as a trial
or to enter your license number
if you've purchased the software and you have an activation code
select activate and then hit the activate button
if you haven't yet purchased it you can run it can trial mode and you get a fully functional
version of the software for about a month
when Media Pro launches you should see something like this you get a welcome screen that gives
you the option to
go ahead and import pictures from several different places and a new catalog is created
that's called catalogue one
let's set up and save our catalog before we do any importing so I’m just going to hit cancel
right now
over here in the catalog we see an empty catalog
and it's got this
name in the title bar catalog one let's say that into the folder that we've just made
I’m going to go into to file
Save as, and then go find my working folder and inside my working folder we’ll find
the catalogs folder
and let's save this as master catalog
there's another movie that's going to outline
uh... lots of preferences
but for the moment let's just make sure we have this first one checked
which is that at startup we're going to open last catalog
this way anytime we open Media Pro we're going to make sure that we're working on the master
catalog
so we get just the one single window when the catalog first comes up
and I suggest that you want to open up the organize panel
so that we can see
the folders that any images that are cataloged are in
as well as this other information that is showing up here in the left-hand panel
I also suggest that we Probably want to go ahead and make the
catalog window bigger
so that we maximize the space that we have to work with
now we have the setup we can start importing images
there a couple of different ways that you can add images to a Media Pro catalog
we can go up to the file menu
to important items and files and folders when we do that we can navigate
through the filesystem of the hard drive
and find some images
and say bring that whole folder in
So I can go find
this set of pictures here
select it
and hit choose
those images are going to first come in with some embedded thumbnails
and as Media Pro chucks through and pulls out information from the pictures
we're going to see
more information showing up
let's open up the date finder and see what's happening here
you can see that as
Media Pro
works through these images and reads
the date out of the meta data
That the camera putting the original file
you can see it's counting these up and adding them to these groups that it's making
based upon the day the picture was shot
I’ve opened up this panel at the bottom that shows me the Progress of the import
and it counts this down as it goes through
the whole set of images
now that Media Pro’s finished cataloging these images
let's do a quick changeover here in this catalog folders area, I’m going to open it up just a little
bit
we can see we only see
the folder that these images are in and none of the hierarchy that's on top of that that's
because this is setup to
trim folder hierarchy
and I can uncheck that and you can see what we see now is the entire folder tree
from that folder that these images are in all the way back up to the hard drive itself
now the other thing we know is that there's lots of different stuff on the hard drive
but we're only seeing these three hundred and thirty-nine images
that's because Media Pro is only going to pay attention to the stuff you've told it to catalog
it's not showing you everything on the drive
in the way that a browser would like
Capture One Pro
or uh... Adobe Bridge
which show you everything that's there that it can read
Media Pro only shows you what you've told it to pay attention to
let's take a look at another way we can
bring images into the catalog and that's just a simple drag-and-drop
you can take a single file
or a folder full of files
and drag that onto the Media Pro window
and you see the plus appear
and then when I let go Media Pros is going to star to catalog all of these images
we can see over here in the folders area
That because this folder is on a separate drive
we can actually see that
whole drive
and navigate down to the folder
and we can also see up here in the file type area
as it discovers new file types and catalogs
these new files we're going to start to see this count up
and we'll see that not only are we going to
have JPEGs in here but we're also going to have Tiffs
and movie files
and again, by looking in the date finder we can see the dates that uh... these particular
images or movies were created
let's let this
finish cataloging and will come back and finish the movie
at the end of the Process we can see
the whole set of images here
if we move over to the date finder
We can look for images by particular days
by selecting here
and if we open up the
file type
panel we can see that that most of these are JPEG’s, there's a number of Tiffs
and then there is a number of movie files as well
who want to play those movie files it's as simple as
double clicking
and hitting the space bar
or going back into the uh... thumbnail view and we can see the movie playing as well
I find this Process of
cataloging a whole drive full of images to be a really wonderful one of discovery so I suggest that
what you do is make a comprehensive catalog
Of stuff that you've got on your hard drive and you're likely to find a bunch of things
that you forgotten about, once you've run through that whole Process
then you really can get a much better handle on your collection
the last step here is to make sure that we save the catalogue
and that way all the work we've done will be visible next time we open the catalog