Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

2
Image Viewers
The life cycle of an image viewer, like that of a farm animal, can be nasty, brutish, and
short, but it can also be the opposite: long and ultimately rewarding to the originator
who gets it right.
The people behind the programs listed in this chapter have all “got it right” in one way
or another. Every image viewer seems to have a personality of its own, from disciplined
to gregarious. To the prospective user, the best advice I can give you is to download several
of them, try them out, and see which is the most congenial. There is no need to accept
the standard Microsoft or Apple way of handling pictures, although both companies do
a good job of it. One photographer may want browsing speed, another ease-of-use, while
still another may be looking for the best way to rename files. There is a product for
everyone, and you can customize most of these products to fit your needs exactly.
If you scour the Internet for image viewers you can find lists that contain 150 or more
products, all of them capable of displaying images as clickable thumbnails that expand
to fit a large window on your screen. Some are still at the embryonic stage: the pet
project of a novice programmer who is learning the craft with every new line of code.
Others have moved on from this level to become fully featured viewers handling several
hundred file formats, with cataloging and editing functions galore. Eventually, an
image viewer may have aspirations to become an end-to-end workflow product, but few
of them ever make it that far.
By its very nature, image viewing is the most fluid category in this book. After all, every
piece of photographic software, whatever its application, needs to display images and
make them viewable. For example, is BreezeBrowser an image viewer with RAW conversion
facilities, or a RAW converter with viewing facilities? Several software packages
with wonderful viewing and image shuffling features (like Apple’s Aperture, Adobe