Some workflow questions/comments; the long version...

Sorry for the long post, but I'd like to discuss some workflow 
thoughts that I had and get opinions from more seasoned IMatch 
users. I tried to answer most of my questions with the existing 
posts, but felt the need to pose the comments/questions below.

Currently I have three websites that I own and maintain: 
http://digitalbohling.com, http://ebohling.com, and 
http://blog.digitalbohling.com. All have a unique reason for their 
existence, though arguably they do overlap somewhat. Now that I have 
finally decided on a single catalog product (yes, IMatch after six 
months of various evaluations) I would like to have a single, 
cohesive web presence. Here's where my dilemma begins…

I have two main purposes for a website: post photos and post 
writings. Currently I use a custom engine (with a custom database) 
that I developed for handling my photos and I use a blog engine for 
my writing. I'd like to change that to a single "engine"
or at least 
make them more cohesive. With IMatch's powerful database and 
scripting capabilities it only makes sense that my photo posts (and 
their metadata) should come from IMatch—eliminating at least one
of 
my issues. But since my writing is a whole separate issue I will 
again need to write a custom engine to handle both. This time 
however, instead of writing custom code to add photo metadata I 
thought I would populate my database with IMatch photo metadata—I 
saw there was a script to do this for a MySQL database, which I'm 
assuming would be fairly straight forward to modify for a SQL 
database. Does this sound like a good approach OR would you 
recommend that I write a Web Gallery script to generate my photo 
pages? Here are my initial thoughts:

Writing my own custom engine to view photos using imported IMatch 
metadata in my database:

- Pro: less files on server (on page can dynamically load all the 
different photos as it does on my site today)
- Pro: Easier to make cohesive with writing posts
- Con: slower than HTML pages
- Con: more effort

Use a Web Gallery Template to generate the photo portion of the site:

- Pro: less coding (I love to code; just do not have ample time)
- Pro: more tightly coupled with IMatch (could also be considered a 
con)
- Pro: HTML files perform slightly better than dynamic ASP.NET pages.
- Con: adds a lot more files to my server
- Con: will still have to write custom code/pages for feedback, 
purchase, etc.
- Con: I'm sure this is a newbie problem, not IMatch, but I
couldn't 
seem to merge pages if I needed functionality of multiple IMatch 
generators.

My other workflow question is around versions, which have been 
discussed on other posts and in the FAQs in the file section. I 
always leave my originals (most often RAW) untouched, create 
a "master" edit file that I then use to generate all other
formats: 
Web, desktop, email, print, etc. I saw a script that I could use to 
copy the metadata to these edited formats, but it seemed like the 
only way I could get IMatch to "see" those new versions was
to 
rescan. I'm guessing that's because it doesn't integrate
with 
Photoshop like PSA or PSE does…which makes sense I guess. Again, 
just wondering if it was a newbie thing or not.

And one final comment about the handling of RAW fi
les…specifically 
Canon 20D files. Is there any way to link the .cr2 and
"buddy" jpg 
file (BreezeBrowser does this)? I saw a couple of posts about this, 
but did not see any clear cut answer.

Again, I apologize for the long post. 

Thanks,
--brandon





 
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