Art Explosion 800,000 - All Those Files and No Search?

Unlike competitors' products, there is no way to search across the entire 800,000 items. Once you have loaded a single image portfolio, you can search within that group of files. However, since most of these contain less than 200 images, the feature is essentially useless. I called Nova Development about the lack of searching and they confirmed that's its not possible. They suggested a workaround of copying all the images and portfolio files onto a hard drive. Even doing this, however, would mean you had to open all of the portfolio databases before you could search. Since the portfolio files are often at different levels in the folder hierarchy, this would be a very tedious process.

Even when you use the paper index and printouts, it doesn't tell you on which CD a piece of art is. You have to use the category name and look through the CDs. They are in alphabetical order by category, so its not too bad. However, each image type (vector, photo, illustration) is categorized individually.

The box makes a big deal about their 15,000 "hi-res" photos; I'm not sure what definition they use for hi-res, but I don't consider 800 x 600 pixels to be hi-res. The quality of these pictures varies between "great" and "looks like a scan of a photo taken with a disposable camera." My randomly selected "US cities" appears to be 80 percent photos from Seattle, San Fransisco and New York--not a great selection.

A lot of the portfolios I selected didn't have any keywords attached to them, so even the limited search functionality available is useless. Given that most of the photo portfolios are not printed in the manual or included in the paper index, and are not keyword searchable, you have but one choice to find these--browsing.

The portfolio viewer has no clue about the fact that the images are on multiple discs. It doesn't prompt you to insert or remove discs. If you look into it, you discover than Nova

The portfolio browser application suffers from the fact that its a standalone image-cataloging application that has been dropped into a clip art package.

The Find dialog box is very confusing--after a search, there appears to be no way to cancel the search and show the whole portfolio. It turns out that this is what the Find All button does.