Shoebox: Of Photos and Footwear

Recently, professional photographers around the world rejoiced in unison when Apple released version 2 of its acclaimed Aperture software — the one-stop photography management studio software. When we reviewed Aperture 2, it was inevitable that comparisons would crop up between it and its less-iLife-friendly competition from Adobe — Lightroom. The conclusion seemed to be that, while both solutions offered a slew of impressive editing features, Aperture was ultimately better suited to managing larger photo collections.

Meanwhile, way down at the base of the ivory tower of professional photography, dedicated amateur shutterbugs (like myself) are left to wonder what we’re to do with our own collections, which are slowly but inexorably bursting through iPhoto’s seams. Sure, iPhoto is a great solution for managing a modest collection of photos and doing all the basic editing and categorizing that such collections require; but if you’re more interested in efficient and speedy organization than you are in the ability to make calendars, then you owe it to yourself to take a look at Shoebox, another wonderful product from KavaSoft.

Shoebox is described as “the solution for organizing all of your photos by content,” and in the simplest of terms, that’s exactly what it does. But stop me if this sounds familiar: what’s the difference between this content-based organization and iPhoto’s keywords? The answer lies primarily in Shoebox’s incredibly convenient ability to teach Spotlight how to recognize photos based on the content tags you’ve assigned them from within the program. And when I say “content”, I don’t just mean the equivalent of iPhoto’s Events — I mean actual content: do you want to keep track of all your photos that have teapots in them, regardless of when they were taken or by what camera? Perhaps you want only blue teapots taken by your trusty Nikon? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

If there’s one thing the folks at KavaSoft are good at, it’s making a good first impression. As soon as you open Shoebox you’ll find yourself presented with a neat, unified, and familiar design that offers you a number of buttons which will help you get started in creating your collection. For my part, I already had my photo collection sitting around in iPhoto, so I clicked the appropriate import button and within seconds (literally, it was amazingly fast) I had my entire collection smiling up at me from its new home. I was happy until I remembered how long it took me to organize them in iPhoto in the first place. Okay, I thought, here we go again. Then I took a closer look and realized that Shoebox had already taken all my albums and converted them to its own categories. Not only that, but it also took my keywords and brought them over undamaged; ready to serve again as the beginning of my new content-based organizational scheme. Even my ratings made the jump without a hitch. I didn’t have to start over with anything at all; I could just carry on organizing from where iPhoto left off.

The main interface presents you with a few different viewing options: there’s a Category Browser (everyone’s favourite iTunes-style system for viewing your collection), a Folder Browser (same thing only for your entire hard drive), a Search Browser, and even a very interesting Camera Browser that lets you view the photos on your connected camera without importing them immediately. In fact, you can even run a slideshow of them straight from your camera or memory card, without any need to import them into your library. For now though, I went with the default Category Browser which showed me my newly-imported collection as a series of thumbnails, with all the categories and albums shown up above in the columns pane. For adding more precise content tags to all of my photos though, I wanted a larger view of them so that I wasn’t stuck squinting at thumbnails. So I activated the slideshow view, which displays one picture at a time in the lower pane, and I got started.

What should have been a tedious process was actually remarkably painless. Starting with the first photo, I’d take a look and see what was in the picture, tack on some keywords at the end of the blue-bubble list of existing categorization, and I was off to the next picture. New categories were created on the fly from what I typed in, and if I came across another photo that fit into an existing category, Shoebox helpfully displayed the possibility in a drop-down menu as I typed. Admittedly, this process could take a significant amount of time if you’re working with a library of thousands of photographs, but the results are certainly worth it as you’ll soon see.

Having organized my photos more precisely, I decided to see just how I could make use of these categories. From the category browser, I found that it was now ridiculously simple to find the exact image that I was looking for from my collection, or have it narrowed down to a list of appropriate alternatives. My favourite feature of the interface comes in the form of KavaSoft’s clever use of mini progress bars beside the category name to indicate the relative number of photos in that category. It’s a remarkably simple but potentially useful piece of visual feedback and I’m hoping that it’ll catch on. Another intelligent feature related to the categories is something called Aliases, which allows you to teach Shoebox about the relationships between your custom content categories so that it can display search results even more intelligently. For example, you can teach it that Christmas happens every year, so that searching for Christmas photos doesn’t just turn up a single year’s album. I should also mention the inclusion of an interesting new way to browse through your collection: something that KavaSoft has called “Surfing.” Surfing through your photos basically involves clicking a little arrow beside any of the items in a photo’s information pane. What this does is it calls up any other photos in your library that conform to the same criteria, which is a nice and quick way to locate similar photos without performing a separate search.

Speaking of searching, if you make use of the Search Browser and set up a complex search for all those blue teapots taken with your trusy Nikon, chances are good that you won’t want to have to re-enter the criteria every time you need to see that particular spread of photos. For cases just like this, Shoebox allows you to create a Smart Folder that contains all the photos that are turned up by your particular search. This Smart Folder is then available for you to browse at your leisure — even outside of Shoebox with Finder! Searches and simple browsing also feature the ability to filter the pictures that are displayed by criteria such as rating, date, categories, camera, etc. And, of course, you can also keep track of all your most-visited albums within Shoebox by adding them to your Favourites.

Something that becomes increasingly important as your collection of photos grows is that you have a backup for it. Shoebox may not give you any options in the way of sending albums off for publication or making pretty calendars with them (like iPhoto does), but it DOES allow you to burn photos to disc in order to keep them backed up. More than that, it actually has a feature that will have laptop users jumping for joy (okay, so maybe it’s just me): once you’ve backed up your photo library onto DVDs or CDs, you can tell Shoebox to keep nothing but a smaller version of each photo — perfect for quick viewing on the go — on your hard drive so that you’re not stuck taking up huge amounts of precious drive real estate when you don’t have to. Then, of course, when you pop the backup disc back in, Shoebox automatically reverts to displaying the full-sized pictures straight from the disc. And if you happen to have a portion of your collection that you’d rather wasn’t publicly viewable to anyone who opens Shoebox, you can create private catalogs of photos which are password protected. These private catalogs also disappear from your recently viewed items and history; perfect for helping what happened in Vegas STAY in Vegas.

It’s likely that if you’re an image enthusiast, you may have access to two monitors. If this happens to be the case, then you can make especially good use of Shoebox’s fullscreen view because (in addition to the standard thumbnails, list, and slideshow that single-monitored users have access to) you’ll also be able to display thumbnails on one monitor and the fullscreen image on the second, or any combination you like.

So here we come to the crux of the issue: who’s Shoebox for and what can it do for you? Well, the answer is actually a lot easier to reach than you might expect. First off, if you’re looking for anything in the way of image editing or publishing options, then you should probably stick to iPhoto because that’s where it’s at. If, however, you’re a photographer with a giant collection of photos who’s just looking for a way to quickly and conveniently index, sort, and organize your collection, then Shoebox is your new best friend. As it turns out, Shoebox is likely the best solution even for the professional photographer when it comes to organization of photos. Sure, it might not have the added editing features of Aperture or Lightroom, but if all you’re looking for is an efficient way to manage your collection, then you can save yourself a lot of money by clicking over to the Shoebox homepage. The Shoebox license is available in two separate formats: you can either buy the “Express” version for $30 (which lets you import a maximum of 10,000 photos) or you can go for Shoebox “Pro”, which lets you import an unlimited number of photos.

My experience with Shoebox has been almost entirely positive so far. Let us know how it’s worked for you!

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