Extensis Portfolio 8.5

Version 8.5 of Portfolio -- the application that catalogues creative digital assets so they can be easily organised, archived and published -- offers few new tools to attract new users, but plenty that will endear it further to existing users.

One feature offered by Portfolio client and single-user versions that will appeal to those with many different types of digital asset -- or similar assets destined for different uses -- is Catalog Types. This means that Portfolio now allows you to configure a catalogue from a number of preconfigured settings.

A brace of timesaving features, meanwhile, should have wide appeal for users. Default Field Values means field values can be automatically applied to all assets as they are catalogued, while a new Presets Palette applies groups of metadata to entire selections of assets through drag-&-dropping a preset from the palette that the user has created.

Compatibility in 8.5 has been broadened, meaning metadata can now be extracted from CS3 and Windows Vista assets, and there is support for new RAW formats, including Canon 1D Mark III, Nikon D40x, and Olympus E-410 and E-510. In addition to this, there is improved support for EPS and PDF file formats. The update resolves a number of user-reported issues. It has fixed an issue where Portfolio was unable to fully catalogue certain EPS and PDF documents on Windows, and addressed numerous problems concerning the extraction of XMP and IPTC metadata. And no longer do preview files fail to be generated when copying an item from one catalogue to another.

Irritating UI glitches have also been ironed out, the quirky scrolling behaviour being chief among these.