Third Light Search Engine
Make your Digital Media instantly searchable
Finding and retrieving pictures from a large collection is simple with the IMS search engine. The software provides a powerful search tool - just enter what you are looking for, and the smart logic behind the search box will find the right images in your system. The advanced mode even includes mechanisms to perform highly specific, refined searches.
The search engine understands and imports industry-standard tags such as IPTC, XMP and EXIF. If you upload a picture into IMS, and later retrieve it, this means your keyword and description data will stay intact as part of the file itself. You can be certain that IMS will interact smoothly with other tools in your workflow.
If you don't use meta data yet, IMS includes an editor to get you started painlessly. The hard work of putting your descriptions and keywords into the pictures is all done for you.
Smart Folders - Saved Searches
You might find that you need to perform certain searches regularly. For example, images of aircraft added in the last month. You can save searches as 'Smart Folders' to achieve this. Note that Smart Folders save the search query, not the results of the query, when they are created, so the Smart Folder will always contain the latest results. Read more...
Anything that IMS can do with a search can be stored as a collection of pictures in a Smart Folder, and the results automatically update to reflect the latest results.
You can provide Atom Feeds of Smart Folders to help with integration or driving traffic to your site, too.
Intelligent search results
The IMS search engine allows search results to be sorted by relevance, date and filename. Whilst relevance is best for most purposes, those working with press photographs may find sorting by date more convenient. Documentation...
If there are no results from a search query which required exact matches, IMS can suggest partial matches instead. It is also able to use the Controlled Vocabulary for spelling correction. Documentation...
Add your own meta data fields
Some organisations may find that you require metadata fields which are not stored by IMS. For example in a library of images taken at an airport, you might wish to add the aircraft's registration as a searchable field. IMS makes this possible by allowing custom fields, which can also be bound to XMP and IPTC if required.
Third Light IMS supports special input types such as text boxes, drop-downs, hierarchical trees and dates, for complete customisation to match your particular requirements. These fields are also interoperable with other products such as Adobe Bridge. Documentation...
Geo-tagged files
Some modern cameras contain GPS receivers, which record the place the picture was taken as part of the metadata. IMS provides links to Google Maps for images which are uploaded with this information. Read more...
