Third Light Search Engine
Go back to the features summary
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 files in your system. The advanced mode includes mechanisms to perform highly specific, refined searches, with specialist data types such as dates and checkbox fields.
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.
Add your own meta data fields
You may require metadata fields which are specific to your organisation. 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, with automatic support for the XMP standard throughout. In Third Light IMS, creating, editing and updating meta data of any kind is simple and efficient, and fully interchangable with other products.
Smart Folders - saved searches
You might find that you need to perform certain searches regularly. For example, you may wish to regularly view images of aircraft added in the last month. 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. Better still, the Smart Folder will always contain the latest results as it updates automatically. Read more...
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 or other fields. 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...
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...
Supported Standards
- EXIF - digital camera data such as exposure information (usually technical data)
- IPTC - press and image library data (widely used by professional news and image managers)
- Adobe™ XMP - the latest generation of picture data, designed to replace IPTC.