Recommendations for a robust/fast Mac photography cataloging/searching software

I have noticed over the years that there are quite a few graphics professionals who are members of the forum. I am part of an in-house corporate design department that has many thousands of photographs stored on our servers for use in various projects that come up.

My boss has just tasked me to come up with an inexpensive solution to be able to easily catalog and search all of those photos by file names and/or metadata tags. For example, find all the photos containing a man wearing a red shirt. We used a program called Portfolio for years which worked really well, but when we upgraded to intel Mac towers, that software no longer functioned and there didn't seem to be an upgrade for it. We have since been trying to get by with Adobe Bridge, but no one here is satisfied with that option. It is incredibly slow, incomplete results, and doesn't work nearly as well as Portfolio used to for us.

Does anyone have suggestions for current Mac software that actually works really well for you under similar needs as us? I thought asking here would be an efficient way to narrow down my research on the topic. If it makes a difference, we are all on OSX 10.6.7. Thank you.

 

OK, I just found out more of the background story on the issue with Extensis Portfolio: we were using a version at least 2-3 major upgrades behind, and the expense to upgrade the site license was deemed too high at that time to be approved. Portfolio is still very alive and well, probably still the best option for us, but apparently too pricey for the bean counters.

 

I've been meaning to try and learn Lightroom but haven't done it yet. Doesn't that have a cataloging feature?

Chad

 

Adobe Bridge can be soooo slow. What're your Mac's specs?

I didn't know Extensis was still around - used to use it, uh, extensively, back in the 1990's on my old Power PC MAC.

I'd check out Lightroom - used it for image editing and I liked it. But what I don't like about it is it tries to be an all-in-one solution from image editing, batch processing, to cataloging. But if it works, it works.

 

I'm not at work right now to check exactly the specs, but it was the top-of-the-line tower offered when they bought them early in 2010.

For the price of Lightroom for everyone, we could be getting the Portfolio updates, which would be the better option for us I think. I was looking for a less expensive solution.