Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Microsoft Expression Media


Microsoft Expression Media is a commercial digital asset management (DAM) cataloguing program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is the next version of iView MediaPro which Microsoft acquired in June 2006, and is available as:

* Standalone
* As part of the Expression Studio suite of design applications
* As part of the future Office 2008 for Mac Media Edition

Expression Media's key function is cataloguing digital assets. Professional and amateur photographers use the program to display and manage a wide range of formats from high resolution raw image formats to complex multi-layered Photoshop files and more common formats such as JPEG and GIF. It can also catalogue a wider range of other media formats including music and video, Adobe PDF, fonts, and rich media formats like Adobe Flash. The user is able to efficiently organize and categorize without being limited to assets' actual folder locations, can add metadata including IPTC annotations, and locate assets which may spread over multiple folder and drive locations, including offline discs.

As well as cataloguing, Expression Media has a range of output functions:

* Print - formats include contact sheets, lists
* Web gallery output
* Conversion to other formats - e.g. raw files can be resized, output as JPEG, and attached to emails
* Slideshow

No comments: