After months of being frustrated with the speed and performance of iPhoto 5, I started to seriously look at photograph management software. And, of course, being a Mac user things like Google’s Picassa are out of my reach for now. After a week of looking, I found what seems to be the ticket for media management – iVew Media Pro.

iView Media Pro has one major downside – it’s $200 USD if you aren’t an educational institution. That’s a bit steep for an iPhoto replacement. But I decided to bite the bullet and download the three week demo anyway, and see if it was worth the money to me. Turns out, it is. I’m on day three of my trial, and I’m trying to find a way to convince myself that I really can buy this before I go to Spain this summer.

First off, let me cover the problems I have with iPhoto. First and foremost, when you plug 4000 images into it, on a box with 512 MB RAM, it takes on the order of 90 – 120 seconds to open. This is on a dual processor G5. Digging deeper, it barely touches the CPU while loading, but the VM system goes crazy. I need to buy more RAM, I know, but I think it’s sad that Apple would ship a box with far less RAM than needed to run one of it’s really slick media applications. And it is slick. But I digress…

Enter iView. The application loads in 4 seconds. 4. Importing my iPhoto library (5.7 GB of photographs, 4,600 files) took around 20 min. However, while it was importing, the system remained responsive – and I could use all the media it had already imported. That, to me, was a sign that something was right with this app. Further, it doesn’t just read JPG’s and their associated EXIF data. It supports most RAW file formats, most image formats, PSDs, Illustrator documents, PowerCADD files, MP3’s, Divx movies – you name it, iView does it.

And did I mention it’s fast?

Also, it has a very robust system for meta data handling – allowing many custom fields to easily be assigned. Sorry Apple, this makes iPhoto seem really clunky and third rate. I’ve not really dug into it’s ability to use Spotlight for indexing and searching. I’m sure it’s coming though.

One thing to note – iView is not an image editing application. It easily allows for files to be opened in any other application on the system, but there is no internal image editing. Brightness, levels, color, contrast, hue, saturation, etc etc ad nauseam – not there. You need to be aware of this before jumping in, and long before you spend $200 on the app. In essence, it seems to be the most robust media management application you can buy for a personal computer, outside of something like Cumulus.

These are all, of course, my initial impressions. We’ll see what the next week brings.