storing EPS, PDF, mov, mpg, avi, mp4, m4v, wmv etc

1. Correct.

2. I don't believe so.

3. You can store movies of SOME types. Generally MPEG4 that would be recorded from a digital SLR. AVI and WMV most certainly will not work.

What you're looking to do isn't really the right fit for Aperture. Aperture is a digital photography workflow application, optomized for working with images (RAW images and JPEG images). It is not a general purpose digital asset manager, and it will have many shortcomings if you attempt to use it for that. There are many better tools for that purpose.

Probably the most comprehensive general-purpose asset manager I know of is DEVONthink, though it's more focused on documents than media assets. It would certainly be great for PDFs and all manner of documents that aren't specifically media formats.

I think a quest to find an "asset manager" that can store all your documents and media together is probably a tough sell; it's more than likely the Finder is the best solution 😉

For academic pdfs use DevonThink with will index them - and if necessary will OCR them (if you have the top version) as well. They are totally searchable. No other app comes close in that capability - and I've tried them all...

But DevonThink is very mucgh text based.

Terence Devlin wrote:

They are totally searchable. No other app comes close in that capability - and I've tried them all...

Evernote has added an excellent PDF search engine including OCR. I recommend it as a "lightweight" solution. DevonThink, while enormously capable, requires many hours to learn and to set-up, and comes wrapped in an ugly, inelegant UI (rumors of an update where long-in-the-tooth last year).

Of course, Finder and Spotlight do an admirable "lightweight" job, too. And -- other than the UI, which is inexpressibly unpleasant -- I'm not knocking DevonThink. It is the only program I know that provides a "heavyweight" solution.

The huge issue with Evernote is that it doesn't store documents in their "native" format.

Instead, it creates a new Evernote note for EVERYTHING and then pulls whatever documents are there in as attachments to the Evernote note. The original document is simply an attachment and cannot be accessed in the Finder or any other way without having it on Evernote's servers.

NO THANKS.

[Off Topic]

Hi William,

William Lloyd wrote:

The huge issue with Evernote is that it doesn't store documents in their "native" format.

Instead, it creates a new Evernote note for EVERYTHING and then pulls whatever documents are there in as attachments to the Evernote note. The original document is simply an attachment and cannot be accessed in the Finder or any other way without having it on Evernote's servers.

NO THANKS.

The second part isn't entirely true. The documents are stored as attachments to Evernote Notes. The Evernote Notes, however, show in Spotlight (which, afaict, indexes the contents of PDF attachments as well at the file name and text in the Note). The PDF files attached to Evernote Notes can be opened in any program that can open PDF's. The changes are saved to the file attached to the Note. The Notes and the attachments can be accessed locally at any time. The Note can be in a Notebook that is duplicated on Evernote's servers (and thus available to any computer or device you use to log-in), or it can be in a Notebook that is _never_ duplicated on Evernote's servers. Any Note can be encrypted (the encryption is not robust).

As a small bonus of the Note-***-attachment set-up, it gives me a substantial text field in which to amass commentary and other processing notes about the attachment -- something I've long wanted to be able to do (the Spotlight search field was never usable this way).

_That_ said, I'm new to Evernote and am just testing it out for myself. There are _a lot_ of reasons Evernote may not work for someone -- but it is dead-simple, works on multiple platforms, and does allow complete search of PDF's (and OCR's them when needed).

Spotlight search in Evernote only works if you use the direct download version of Evernote. It hasn't worked with the App Store version in 18 months or more 😉

I've spent obscene amounts of time tinkering with this (DEVONthink, Leap, Together, EagleFiler, Yojimbo, using Finder, using Dropbox, using TextEdit, Preview, and iCloud, using Evernote, using OS X Mavericks tags), YOU NAME IT. All of them have real frustrations.

That said, if you want a flexible (though UGLY) asset manager document-based junk drawer for OS X, DEVONthink is the best with searching/finding stuff. Evernote is great at getting stuff on every platform, but it is a real stretch to use it for documents instead of notes. Yes, the attachments are embedded in the notes and you can extract them as you see fit, but of course do note that when you do this it's created as a "new" document in OS X so the file creation/modification dates are set to the exact time of the export; the original file metadata is gone.

Kirby Krieger wrote:

As a small bonus of the Note-***-attachment set-up, it gives me a substantial text field in which to amass commentary and other processing notes about the attachment

Well Heels' Peals, I forgot that Latin was censored on these forums. Suum cuique, I say.

hotwheels...

Take a look at Neofinder. It handles all kinds of formats, including those in your title. There's a trial available that let's you create up to 10 catalogs.

I looked at it for the possibility of indexing photo archive drives, but it fell short in IPTC handling. But for all the formats you are talking about, it might be a solution. And support from the developer was very good.

Probably worth the time to check it out...it won't cost you anything but time.

Kirby

I'll fight you on this one - while no one ever accused DT of being pretty to look at - it's not difficult to use or set up. Rather like Aperture, you need to decide on a managed or referenced Library and off you go. The basics are simple, and then like any app, more power is revealed as you use it more. But the basics - getting material in, searching and getting material out are very simple and straight forward. The search is unrivalled, and yes, while creating searches like

find me every instance of Washington within five words of George

and then limiting to it to a batch of files or the whole database takes some learning, that form of searching is going to take some doing in any app. Can you do that in Evernote? Can you export OCRd pdfs?

Mortarboards on the quad at dawn...

I've never used Papers, so I can't say. Mostly I've used Yojimbo, which is nice (I really like how the tagging works). Yojimbo pulls documents into its local database, but they're stored as documents, and you can export them any time you want with all their metadata intact (unlike Evernote where documents are attached to notes).

Yojimbo supports a limited set of document types, though. It supports PDFs, text (rich or plain), bookmarks, and some image types (JPEG, GIF, etc.). If you use sync with Yojimbo across a couple machines, I've found it has limits to scalability - once I got over about 300 MB in there, I started having real sync issues. So I wouldn't use it as an image manager for SURE.

Yojimbo also doesn't do OCR.

I truly think that DEVONthink is the most capable digital asset manager for non-photo files. The pro version will OCR, and it really is good at organizing and categorizing. It has some "artificial intelligence" which is targeted at research and it does a great job.

There are only two knocks on DEVONthink from my POV:

1. It's ugly (for a Mac application, this matters to me, and it just has too many options and is a wreck)

2. It doesn't really sync (in a way that I'm a fan of). I think there's an agent you can run but I dunno... it would be nice if it synced like Together or Yojimbo do.

[Off topic?]

I was extrapolating from n=1, and spoke with certainty where I should not have (except on the absence of visual grace, which is profound and, imho, inarguable). So no fight from me -- but I'm happy to arm wrestle you in public, with the goal of raising everyone's knowledge and empowerment.

I had trouble setting it up. The topology -- where the information was, and in which containers -- was never clear. The use of multiple databases confused me, as did the use of "duplicates" and "replicates". I had trouble properly installing "Add-ons".

I would very much like to give it a second chance. I think we agree, the pickings are slim, though not tattered. Can you recommend a guide to me? I would like to find software that allows me to institute as robust and adept a system for file and task management, as Aperture has proven to be for image management.