Library and Catalogs

Cataloging and Asset Management in Bibble 5 is the fastest way to help you organize your images.

Bibble 5 lets you import your images into searchable Catalogs, allowing you to organize your images to make finding specific images quick and easy. You can import images that already exist on your hard drive, on a network or external drive, or on removable media like CD's, DVD's, or memory cards. Once images are in a Catalog, you can search by keywords, filename or other attributes, browse by shooting information, keywords, and many other attributes, and the Catalog stores other information about your images, and the adjustments applied to your images, making Bibble easier and faster to use.

This section will examine how to create Catalogs, the various options available when creating Catalogs, and the features available when using Catalogs.

Library Tab Showing Two Catalogs

Catalogs are grouped together on the Library Tab of the Browse Panel. The image above shows the Catalog Browser with two Bibble 5 Catalogs open, and highlights some of the controls offered in the Catalog Browser, like the Search Box and the Recurse Folders toggle.

The first four options all will build a catalog of your images, allowing you to search and browse through the catalog to view images from any number of different folders or to search for images by keywords, image settings, shooting time or date, or many other items.

The last option - Not Importing Images - allows you to bypass Bibble 5's built in Asset Management system. This is a great option if you are using another application to catalog and organize your images, and only want to use Bibble for image editing and optimizations. This option allows you to browse images by folder, allowing you to get right to work without waiting for images to import or to be copied or moved into your catalog. This option, also called the File System approach, is the fastest way to get started with Bibble 5, but does limit some of the features only available when using a Catalog.

NOTE: You can start off working with images directly from your existing folder structure, and then later choose to import these into a catalog.

You'll gain access to the following features when using Bibble 5's Asset Management features, but you'll need to import images into a Catalog first.

•	Browsing Multiple Folders at once - select multiple folders to view thumbnails from all the selected images, or you can Recurse folders to shown thumbnails from the selected folder and all sub-folders of the selected folder.

•	Persistent Edit History - maintaining a log of every image or metadata adjustment you've made to your images, and keeping that log available from day to day, month to month (working in File System mode limits the adjustment history only within that one Bibble 5 session).

•	Image Searching - Find images by searching for filename, EXIF, IPTC or other metadata.

•	Metadata Browsing - Browse through your catalog using EXIF, IPTC or other metadata.

•	Image Stacks - Group Versions from one or many Master Files together into Stacks.

•	Off-Line Image Browsing - Find and manage images that are stored on off-line media like CD's, DVD's or external hard drives.

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Initial Image Settings - Bibble will store the first set of adjustments found for a every image as those images are bring imported, allowing you to quickly revert to these settings at any time. The Initial Settings may be the Default settings at the time of import, or may have been edits or adjustments made by Bibble 5 on a different computer, or before importing the images into your Library.