At the start of February 2009, Microsoft announced that by the end of the month it would provide Service Pack 2 for Expression Media 2. Well, the Redmond company has indeed managed to live up to its promise, as SP3 for Expression Media 2 is here. According to the software giant the service pack bits are available in the following languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean on Windows as well as Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish on Mac.

At the time of this article, the knowledge base article accompanying the service pack was not yet live. When it will be published, users will be able to access extensive information on Expression Media 2 SP2 – just look for Microsoft KB article 962902. Anita Oakley, a support escalation engineer for Expression Media, indicated that, although the download could not be live yet either, Microsoft was hard at work laboring to make the bits available via Microsoft Update and Windows Update. SP2 for Expression Media 2 will be accessible through MU and WU.

Microsoft is recommending its Expression Media 2 as a “professional asset management tool.” The solution is essentially designed to permit users to build what Microsoft referred to as visual databases of media. A single catalog of content can contain as much as 128,000 files stored in various locations from hard drives to network shares, to DVDs.

Oakley also provided a comprehensive list of changes that the second service pack for Expression Media 2 brings to the table on both Windows and Mac OS X:

Issues that this service pack fixes in Macintosh and in Windows

- Importing a number of large images is very slow
- XML export and import may scramble custom fields
- Catalogs that are saved from a Macintosh lose paths to original media if the catalogs are opened from a server on a Windows-based computer
- Original file paths are used instead of new file paths when you are copying items to a new catalog
- Silverlight 2.0 is not detected correctly by Mozilla Firefox browsers when you are viewing Silverlight HTML galleries
- Thumbnails cannot honor file's embedded color profile
- Note: Thumbnails should be rebuilt after you install this service pack for colors to be correct.

Issues that this service pack fixes in Windows

- User preference for rendering engine is not used
- Right-clicking to open a file in the default application opens wrong file after you sort the files in list view
- Moving hierarchical keywords may incorrectly apply flat keywords to images
- Scripting annotations garbles text with Unicode characters
- File paths are broken if the imported folder contains more than 1024 subfolders
- You cannot reset paths when you set a path to the root of a drive
- Expression Media 2 may crash when you import a file from a folder that was removed from the organize panel
- Expression Media 2 may crash when an import is canceled and then files are imported from the root of a drive
- Renaming a folder on a network share may fail and the folder may disappear from organize panel
- Files whose names have more than 64 characters are always imported again when you update folders in organize panel
- Additional folders are not added in organize panel for saved catalogs when the disk volume name is the system default. Typically, the system default is a "Local Disk"
- TIFF RAW files from Phase One Digital Backs consume several megabytes in catalog space
- Random numbers may display on catalog folders if the disk does not have a volume name
- HTML gallery links show question marks when the gallery is viewed in Mozilla Firefox browsers

Issues that this service pack fixes in Macintosh

- You cannot import PPT and XLS files
- "Contact sheet out of range" errors are improved and the experience for making contact sheets is improved
- Batch Rename feature changes Cyrillic characters into question mark characters when you are using the "Strip Diacriticals" function
- When you use the "Update Folders Now" function, duplicate folders may be shown and file links may be broken


Microsoft Expression Media 2 for Windows is available for download here.

Microsoft Expression Media 2 for Mac OS X is available for download here.