VERDICT: Bizarrely antiquated and underpowered creative asset management.

To give a general boost to its professional design credentials and in particular to its Expression Studio suite, Microsoft decided that it needed an application for managing media assets and so bought up iView MediaPro 3...

And, apart from the bundling of the new Expression Media Encoder (see below), that’s pretty much what Microsoft has released as the new Expression Media. This is a major disappointment as the iView environment sticks out from the other Expression apps like a sore thumb. More importantly, it looks ugly, dated and amateurish with the lack of smoothly resizable thumbnails and the shareware-style file listing particularly jarring. These aren’t just cosmetic criticisms – the success of a visual management application largely depends on its interface.
In terms of power, Expression Media supports over 100 file formats including the usual suspects and some extras such as PDF and various camera RAW formats. However to create the asset thumbnails you first have to import the relevant directories into catalogs. This does mean that you can log removable media such as CD-ROMs, and you can at least set up folder watching, but the need to manually setup multiple catalogs rather than an immediately explorable, single Tree view of all the assets on your hard disk is hugely limiting and way past its sell-by-date.
Once you’ve selected your creative asset, you can preview it in its own window (including video files) and most of the usual options are there: image rotation, basic rating, keyword tagging, batch renaming and conversion to other supported formats. You can also drag-and-drop supported files into Expression Design and Media Encoder though, disappointingly, not into the central Expression Blend. More advanced options include the ability to output thumbnails as web galleries, to create slideshows which can be saved as QuickTime videos and to create layouts that can be saved to PDF – though in each case the level of control is pretty basic.
More to the point, in each case the creation process is awkward and uninviting.
Again it comes back to the interface – if ever a program was crying out for an Expression Blend-based makeover, Expression Media is it. As it stands, no-one should be interested in the exorbitant standalone version of Expression Media and - Expression Media Encoder aside - few Studio users will get much benefit from the bundled version.

EASE OF USE 2/6
FEATURES 3/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 2/6
OVERALL 2/6