As its name suggests, Curator is an art manager and cataloger. With it you can organize collections of graphic documents, browse through entire volumes, search for individual images, and display or print selections.
Curator is really two programs — one a stand-alone application and the other a desk accessory. For all practical purposes, they're identical, and which you use depends on your work habits. Curator is compatible with MultiFinder; so you can run the application concurrently with other programs.
Unlike other art-management systems, which categorize images and build their own files. Curator is a “free form” organizer that works with your images where they are. Because it’s multilingual, it catalogs them in their own format — MacPaint, PICT, TIFF, and so on.
The first time you open a graphics disk or volume, Curator reads the files, creates a Thumbnail (miniature) for each image, and builds a Catalog. Curator writes archiving information to each document; so your files will grow in size slightly. A Catalog is a directory that tells Curator where each image with its keywords and Thumbnail is stored.
Catalog information is linked to its volume. On floppies, it's written to the individual disk. If there isn’t room on a disk, or if it’s locked, a baffled Thumbnail icon is displayed. The program still lets you view and operate on the graphics, but search capabilities are lost. On hard disks, the Catalog is placed at the root level.
Once a Catalog has been constructed, keywords may be assigned, added, updated, or deleted from an image at any time. If you move a document from one volume to another, Curator loses track of it until you update the Catalog with a Show Keywords command for that image. Move the Catalog, and Curator creates another
Compiling Catalogs and generating Thumbnails (especially from complex image formats) can be slow. Included with Curator is Curator’s Assistant, a utility that you can bring in to pinch-hit. It scans your files, creates Thumbnails for any additions, and updates the Catalog. Although optimized for speed, the process still takes time. Assistant runs in the background with MultiFinder or can be put to work overnight.
You can select cataloged graphics by name or by Thumbnail. Each method has its own dialog tailored to the task. In either case, data about the selected graphic (date created, date modified, type, and program of origin) is displayed, and a pop-up menu shows the attached keywords.
Curator also lets you browse through images one by one or conduct searches by name or keyword. For name searches, it matches a partial or exact character string. When searching by keyword, it lists all keys stored with that volume and lets you choose one or a multiple. When looking through volumes with multiple file formats, you can narrow search criteria by eliminating some formats from the sort.
Curator can also catalog graphics in PictureBase Library format. In this case, however, the images are “extracted” from the Library files and rewritten. Keywords assigned in PictureBase may be added to a Curator Catalog, retained with the image (as descriptions), or simply ignored.
As well as an image cataloger, Curator is a graphics-file translator that converts files created with one program for use in another. It reads and writes MacPaint, TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), PICT, Glue (Solutions International's format), PostScript Text, and both the Mac (EPSF) and IBM (EPSP) Encapsulated PostScript formats. Its ability to work with both flavors of Encapsulated Postscript permits graphics to be transferred to and from the MS-DOS world.
Because of the different levels of information encoded in each, not every format can be converted to every other. And, of course, the process is one of translation not transformation. Changing a bit map into PICT, for example, will not endow that image with object-graphics characteristics. Still, Curator streamlines the interchange of graphics between applications. For some users, this is reason enough to buy the package.
My only complaint about Curator is that after opening a document, you must return to the program's control panel to resume searching — a small annoyance. The program works well, either as an application or as a DA. And as minor revisions have been implemented, Solutions International, a small company with an excellent product line, has (thus far) provided free updates to registered users. If you need to improve access to your graphics files or translate them to other formats. Curator is certainly worth your consideration.
Martinez, Carlos Domingo. (September 1988). Curator. MacUser. (pgs. 56-57).
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out of 10 (0 vote)
14 / 
2014-06-05 / 
f39cbd8156490c5de7ccfac542b67fdd776c04d4 / 
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Curator.img_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
