Phase One Media Pro

» see phaseone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This program carried four names in nineteen years and died owned by a Danish camera company that had a better one of its own. It began as iView, a Macintosh-only shareware gallery from Script Software, the sort of thing reviewed in Mac magazines in 1999 as a neat way to see what was in a folder. It grew up through a string of versions and a Windows port, and by version 3 it was called iView MediaPro and belonged to iView Multimedia in London.

What it actually did was cataloging, which is a less glamorous job than editing and a more important one. You pointed it at images wherever they lived, including on discs that were not currently plugged in, and it built a catalog with thumbnails and metadata that you could sort and search without touching the originals or caring which folder they sat in. It wrote IPTC annotations and printed contact sheets. It built web galleries and slideshows. It also indexed audio and video files as happily as photographs. For a working photographer with a hundred thousand raw files on a shelf of external drives, that was the whole job.

Microsoft bought iView Multimedia in June 2006 and shipped the result as Microsoft Expression Media, released to manufacturing on 30 April 2007 alongside the rest of the Expression line and announced at the MIX conference. The old iView download page was edited to say the quiet part: it was no longer possible to buy MediaPro from any source, because MediaPro had become Microsoft Expression Media. Three years later Microsoft sold it on to Phase One, in May 2010, and Phase One shipped it as Media Pro 1 on 10 May 2011.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three owners ~

Each owner had a reason to want it and a reason to lose interest. Microsoft bought a professional media catalog when it was assembling the Expression suite to go after Adobe's creative tools, and when that campaign was wound down the catalog had nowhere to sit. Phase One bought it because Phase One sells medium format camera backs to people with enormous files, and a cataloging tool fits that customer precisely.

Then Capture One, Phase One's raw converter, grew its own catalog. Once the flagship product could organize libraries as well as develop them, the second application was a support obligation with a shrinking reason to exist. The 2018 notice reads exactly like that: no more sales, plus a tutorial for migrating your Media Pro SE catalog into Capture One.

~ the funny part ~

I am not the customer here and never was. My photography has never involved a raw library big enough to need a database in front of it, and the people this was written for were measuring their archives in tens of thousands of files before I owned a digital camera at all. The reason it is in this list is the ownership chain, which is unusually clean: a shareware author's gallery app, acquired into a Microsoft product line, sold out of it, then retired by the company that bought it in favor of its own flagship. Software usually dies when its company does. This one outlived two owners and was put down by a third while in perfectly good health.

~ the last build ~

Version 2.1.0.161, 8 August 2016. Two years later the sales page became a discontinuation notice and the product stopped being a product, though Phase One was careful to say that Media Pro SE would keep running on supported systems and would keep getting technical support, just never another update.

Anyone who ignored the migration advice kept a working catalog, and some photographers did exactly that for years, because a catalog format you already trust is worth more than a newer one you have to re-verify. The notice itself survives only in the archive now, at an aspx URL that stopped resolving years ago. What holds the chain of names together is a Wikipedia redirect: type Expression Media and you land on Media Pro.

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