I’m looking for a good image browser, and was wondering what people use. I have the Canon ZoomBrowser EX right now, but I’d like to upgrade. Does anybody use Photo Mechanic 4 (link)? I hear that it’s pretty good, but haven’t had any experience with it. Any thoughts?
Generally speaking I’ll use a combination of:
- The “Filmstrip” viewing mode in Windows Explorer (if I’m ‘exploring’ rather than sitting down for some sort of photo viewing session)
- IrfanView (for all my resizing because it’s quick and easy, in full screen mode to show images to other people, and for quick viewing of images because it loads really really quickly)
- PhotoShop (for more advianced editing)
- Picasa (for most general touch-ups, I think it does a fine job other than occasionally applying too much contrast, also handy for straightening photos)
Andrew
What kind of photography are you doing that you’d need such a fancy photo cataloger? If you need to catalog a lot of photos it looks like Photo Mechanic would be good, but the web page doesn’t go into much detail on the specific features it does.
For basic cataloging and editing for home and amateur photography a combination of freeware applications may fit your needs.
Andrew already mentioned IrfanView and Picasa. Another applications similar to IrfanView is XNView. It is similar in features to IrfanView, but the interface is a little different. Try both and see which one you like better. They’re both image browsers with basic image editing features, and both are free (as in beer).
For editing EXIF and IPTC data I use Exifer. It’s a bit clumsy in use, but works for the occasional needs I have to edit or view EXIF data in my photos.