Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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of the user. It offers full-screen viewing, side-by-side comparison, scalable contact sheets,
photo tagging, sorting into folders, back-up facilities, and single-step features that allow
you to combine several operations to speed the workflow.
Comments
Although its functionality is limited to browsing, sorting, and keywording, Photo
Mechanic is so efficient that it is the viewer of choice for thousands of photographers.
Why? Partly because of its time-saving features, such as being able to copy to two different
destinations (or drives) at the same time, or accepting data from multiple cards
on multiple readers. Its Batch Captioning facility is first-rate, thumbnail display speed
is almost instant, and it can open most RAW files although it does not fully convert
them. It has stiff competition from Apple’s Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, and Microsoft’s
Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro).
Version: Photo Mechanic 4.5.3 (2008)
OS: Windows XP, 2000, and Vista; Mac OS X 10.3
RAM: 256MB
Supported file formats: Most RAW formats; JPEG and TIFF
Price level: Approx. $150
Address: Camera Bits, Inc., 4055 NW Columbia Ave., Portland, OR 97229, United States
www.camerabits.com
Picasa
The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Vendor: Google
Purpose: Fun-to-use viewer with Geotagging and photo-sharing facilities
Description
Google’s image viewer is a great organizational tool. It automatically indexes every image
on your computer at launch; finds “the pictures you forgot you had” (and wish you had
deleted); and then lets you move them all around until you are happy with them. The
interface is luxurious and very convenient for rapid browsing. It lets you rename pictures
from within the program or caption them while they are being displayed. If you
also have Google Earth, the Geotagging feature lets you place a thumbnail of the image
directly on to a Google aerial photo/map, clickable to the original.
Among Picasa’s most useful features is Timeline, which lets you scroll through your pictures
in chronological order. Picasa is available in many languages, including Thai,
Tagalog, and Turkish.