I do not believe this. I believe, maybe in some aspects LR3 is better, but users have different focal points.

Like users, who have a LOT of images. Until now, I have not found a DAM, what can deal with a LOT of images. And I tried several DAMs.
With 1'000 images, no problems.
With 10'000 images, no problems.
With 100'000 images ... the troubles arises.
With 200'000 images ... ?

Maybe LR3 has solved this, but as long as I have not seen it, I do not believe this.



Maybe it will be too late for some people (maybe like you), but there are some people out there, they will wait



What makes you so sure? Mario and IMatch are in business since (roughly) 2000, well, and IMatch is still in business.
Why should this not work?




This can be better, but can also be bad.
There has been quite a lot of great programs, made by a "professional team" ... and these programs are not more on the market.
The team was splitted in conflicts, one has stolen the whole code, backups and so and went to another country, or more common, the small company has been taken over by a big company and the program simply disappeared.

I trust more a single man as a team with several differnt arguments, how the program should be.

But I see your point and I agree, we can find positive and negative things for a single man or for a team.

Thank you for your posting.

Is is very had for a single person company, Business model to succeed. As the saying goes "what if Mario is hit by a bus?" (I hope not) there goes the product.

Competitors will pick up the pace and you lose ground. I am not saying there won't be die hard users but It is important also to keep your promises.

I work in the software industry I cannot think of telling a client "sometime soon" maybe google or microsoft can, as they are a monopoly, but not when there are competitors.

-Cheers

You must be assuming that Mario has nobody to inherit IMatch. Or maybe you believe that there is nobody willing to buy IMatch. If Mario had two dozen employees and got hit by a bus, how much better would IMatch fair?

Albert Einstein did some brilliant work by himself and many of his theories survive long after his death. I suspect that much of Mario's work would survive his demise. It took a large team at a giant corporation to develop the Ford Edsel but it died right away. Adobe has released products that never lasted long enough to have a version 2 released simply because Adobe changed their mind.

Microsoft does project release dates and will release a product before it is ready. Some people who "work in the software industry" take it for granted that an initial release from Microsoft will be full of bugs.

I don't recall Mario promising a date for release of IMatch 5. No "promise" has been given and none broken.

If Mario were to hire a team to develop IMatch, who would direct that team? I am not sure that I would want to take great developer and make him into a manager. I have seen men that were doing a great job fail when promoted to management.

I also work in software industry and very appreciate Mario's work. It's hard to believe that Mario develops and supports IMatch after his main work during nights and weekends. I understand that Mario is keen on development such an exciting project. The problem is that it really can't work for the long time. Every human being needs rest. What if Mario "lost" his free time for his hobby, after marriage and if baby comes
I have seen a lot of hobbyist's projects that stuck on this.
It would be really nice to hear that Mario created small group of developers because of this reason.

This type of thread seems to appear from time to time and affords some great amusement but is ultimately totally futile.

Mario will do what Mario does and IMatch is what IMatch is, it really is that simple. As users we either step onto the bandwagon or we don't. The issue is the same with all software. If it does what we want, then we invest in it. There are no guarantees about the future.

Photools isn't Adobe or Microsoft. I have no idea how much Mario earns from IMatch, but given it's pricing structure, I guess not enough to financially support the development team that some of you want to encourage him to take on board. Employing staff doesn't come cheap and it's an expensive business costing around twice as much as the salaries that you pay your staff in extra taxes and insurances.

What this would mean would be an exponential rise in the cost of IMatch. Something which I guarantee most of us would be unable to afford, but if you are all willing to pay, for example, $650 for a copy of IMatch 5 then $180 for each bug fix every 18 months then, yes, you'd probably see it released very shortly and with the team you're asking for.

If we don't like the current situation or have concerns then we are always free to shop elsewhere. Interestingly, IMatch's Government service and professional photographer user base doesn't appear to have any qualms about investing in IMatch in it's current state with only one person at the helm.

Maybe they are not employed in the software development field.

Hi all,

As indicated earlier, this discussion regularly pops up and I think everybody makes some valid points. In the end, (I assume) Mario is the sole owner of IMatch and Photools and he can do whatever he thinks is right with the application.

If he would found a company, employ 3 or 5 people and increase the price for IMatch NG to $299... that's his choice. It could also be his choice to at a certain moment terminate that company and destroy the source code.

If he decides to sell the IMatch code to Adobe, Microsoft or any other big company, this company might decide to change it, to pull it from the market or make it part of another application. Pixmantec once sold RawShooter for $60 or so; Adobe acquired the code and made it part of Lightroom, at $299...

So, that won't work. What probably might work is something like an Open Source project where others can help developing and explore and alter the source code, but I assume that might raise a problem in Mario's business model :)

Concluding, Yes, we do put our stake (and images) in the hands of a sole developer, and yes, we all would love to see NG right away as we're waiting for a long time already and got a promising teaser a few months ago. But, as stated by Mario (and many others), everybody's free to explore different solutions in the meantime...

My two cents,

Ger

Let's just kill this with a concrete example: Bibble. It is such a parallel situation to me it's eerie.

Where Mario is working alone as a side thing, Bibble is a standalone software company with a team of developers. It still took them 2 years to get their new version out. It is about a radical, ground-up rewrite as NG appears to be.

Through that long wait current users still were able to use the existing version (which was updated many times) and the competition did not eliminate them, even though most came out with new versions of their own--in fact LR came out with 2 major versions. I did not notice any slackening of activity on their support forums. In the ned IMHO, the wait was well worth it--I expect the parallels here will hold true for that.

BTW, the loss of RawShooter was something of a tragedy. Excellent converter for the time with a lot of promise. But then, it got me moved to Bibble which is even better.

IMatch was a great piece of software for several years. But time, technics and workflows are changing. What Mario did over the last years (and I'm sure with NG he will doing it too) was and is a really great job.

But, as somebody else wrote here before, there are now some other very well DMAs available - especially (after testing it for a while) LR3 - which is fast and also able to handle 200.000 files.

My needs to IMatch were to handle large amount of image files, have hierarchical keywordings (with categories) and the ability to write my own scripts (what I did :-)). And last but not least: a good and helpful community with an allways excellent support by Mario.

All these aspects are now provided by LR3, too. Its fast even with large catalogs, it has (with the current release) a good API and it supports my workflow very well, a good and active community with a direct contact to the develpment team.

As a prof. photographer I need a fast state-of-the-art software which makes my work and my life easier and faster. I cannot wait several years for new features or new versions - even if I like the software and the job that Mario did and does.

Well, after testing LR3 now for 2 months I have decided to make the complete switch and have deinstalled IMatch today. It was a great time and a great program. But now other and (in my opinion) better players are on the market (and yet available).


Cheers and thanks again for the time,
Lars

Hey Lars
thanks a lot for your comment, it is very nice of you, to write such a posting, though you will not more use IMatch.

I did not know, that LR3 can handle also such a lot of images fast enough.

I switched NOW for only 90 seconds to a LR-forum and saw this, 2 hours before one wrote "I just upgraded from lightroom 2.7 to lightroom 3. I then proceeded to import my old catalog. this all went fine but lightroom is so slow, the thumbnail previews take forever to load"

and saw some questions with problems, so also LR3 will be not without troubles.

I am also a pro photographer, and -to be honest- would not hesitate to switch away from IMatch, if there where two things true for me:

1) there must be a very good DAM out there
2) With IMatch I can not do, what I want with my images

While point 1 I am not sure about, point 2 is true for me. I have almost never found a thing, what I wanted to do with my images, what I could not do with IMatch.

Hence, why should I than leave IMatch?
Of course IMatch has not more a very modern UI and we can some troubles, but IMatch does the job FOR ME.

Yes, we have waitet a LONG time for IMatch NG, for some users too long. But the current IMatch does it for me, and we have not more to wait so long on NG, as we have already waited.

Therefore, I stay still with IMatch ... as long, as I will be at a point, where IMatch is not more good enough, and this point seems to be far away.

Lars, I wish you a good time with LR, and who knows, maybe we will see you again here some day!