We all know about the major apps used by digital photographers but what about the little utilities that never get mentioned many of which make professional life so much easier! There's so many cool utilities I've come across from database and accounting utilities to single purpose batch image processors.
Add your favorites and maybe give a short description and/or a URL.
Here's one for Mac from me: Tags is an app that allows you to manage all your files so that you can easily find the files that you need, when you need them. Tag everything on your Mac: documents, emails, images. Quickly find files irrespective of where you saved them. You can bring up the Tag's UI with a simple keystroke in most applications, so that you can Tag files and search for Tags, wherever you are. You can also use Applescript to automatically tag files based on a huge number of different criteria - including metadata.
I think it's useful for tagging/finding all the files (text, addresses, maps, images, bills, etc.) for any given project, job, or client.
When using a lot of applications on VISTA / Windows 7 it is very nice to be able to switch between different Virtual Desktops. This facility was available as Deskman on XP as a "Microsoft Power Toy"
If you run a few spread sheets, have several images being processed, are using email, printing stuff out and browsing the web all at the same time a single desktop can get very cluttered even with a large monitor.
Virtual desktops fix this problem -- you see each desktop as it's own desktop -- you can configure different backgrounds etc etc on it.
Linux has had this type of stuff in it for years BTW.
However it only ran on XP.
For VISTA (both X-32 and X-64) and Windows 7 (both 32 and 64 bit versions) there is a very similar facility available from Microsoft Sysinternals
Here's a link to most of the utilities -- The Virtual desktop is called DESKTOPS
I think it may be good for session management. Each set of images gets created (locally or on a file server) as a project - so it keeps images together by session or folder I guess if you so choose. And then it keeps a revision history like Time Machine (on a Mac) up to 10 deep of the files as you modify them. So it's kinda like a personal (local or remote) Time Machine with project management locking and etc. Edit in PhotoShop, save and next time you can either reopen the last saved one or the original up to 10 deep via context menus or other. Good for JPeg shooters me thinks. And it can keep your web site up to date automatically too - it seems.
Opanda IExif is a professional Exif viewer in Windows / IE / Firefox, From a photographer's eye, It displays the image taken from digital camera and every item of EXIF data in the image from beginning to end. The user can learn about how and where to take the photo, what the camera's model is, the detail of photographer and more in IExif. You can know more information and some unbeknown story. It is not only the good assistant to study photography, but also the best choice to view EXIF for photographer, shutterbug, photo editor and so on...
Irfanview opens most graphic files, it plays .FLV files (flash), and it resizes and lets you add text (like copyright or title) for web use. Among other things.
Kyle, thanks for the headsup about the desktop switcher. I tried it and love it!
My contribution is Vault by http://www.personalmicrocosms.com It's a great little program for keeping information in an easy to use form. I keep tips, program serial numbers, etc. - anything you can cut and paste in vault. The new version saves pics too. Free to try.
On my Mac I use Name Mangler to automatically and quickly rename groups of files.
I use Xee to quickly view my photos as it preserves the colour profiles compared to the native Preview program that comes with my Mac that messes up all the colour information in my photos.
But I use Preview (comes with our Mac) to batch resize and save images when resizing for the web.
well, ice clean and cocktail for maintanence on os x
gimp for ps alternative. neooffice or openoffice for free Microsoft alternative. no need for tag or quicksilver, as google search on mac does both, and for deep search, you can double up its ability with spotlight.
namemangler YEAH
plenty of others, not plenty of time before sleep!
I gotta admit, PC has it all over MAC on the utility tip, especially when it's free.
Irfanview. Wanna do pretty much anything with a photo, and fast? Irfanview.
Bulk Rename Utility. It's badass, you can rip names apart and reedit them and rename in bulk.
Teracopy. Beats the piss out of windows copy, where if a file fails to copy you're pooched. This skips and retries, complete with a listing of what files did and didn't go.
Filezilla. It has the "zilla" tag, which I always thought meant "kick ass". I need more xxxzilla apps in my life. Copyzilla,Erasezilla,Formatzilla. The possibilities are endless. Oh, Filezilla is an FTP application.
Belvedere, a free Hazel knockoff. It's like comparing a knife to a gun in a gunfight though. It's free, so it's got that going for it, but I'd rather pay for Hazel to be a PC app.
These are just a few for pc, I'll see if I can remember the rest. I have way too much time and way too many different apps on my computers.
For Mac, much as I love it, there isn't a ton of free stuff. Burn is nice. Cyberduck.
If you want the pimpy stuff, you gotta pay, but then you get some really nice apps
Hazel. I love hazel. Makes being neat almost a possibility.
Finder. Where would I be without you. I was saddened to realize that the Mac OSX finder is actually somehow worse than Windows Explorer. I mean it's not like Windows was settings standards for excellence. Finder is awesome.
Xee, I'm new to it, but it is nice.
Automator. Comes with OSX. Has a little robot icon. Really, that's hard to match. But it does a lot. I used it to separate home from away games in a calendar so I could create a calendar for local events that I needed to shoot.
And IF there is a piece of software that is available only as a Windows version that you just can't live without, you have the ability to run it on your Mac via this FREE Mac based virtual machine software from a company you may have heard about named Sun Microsystems; http://www.virtualbox.org/
Something else to consider, a recent study (sorry I don't have a link) compared the quality of software for each platform, with results showing Mac developers tend to produce software with better over all quality and stability . Mind you, I've come across some real duds for my Mac computers, but much less frequently than compared with what I've come across for my Windows based machines.
QPict looks pretty good. http://www.qpict.net/index.html
I'm just playing with it now but so far it's very solid QPict is a fully featured, easy-to-use media asset manager supporting a wide assortment of multimedia file types - including images (camera RAW [over 200 cameras supported], psd, tif, jpg, png, gif, vector, eps, bmp & more) full-screen video, MP3 audio, fonts, live streaming audio and live streaming video. It fully supports meta data such as ANPA (IPTC) and EXIF photo information. It includes advanced search and batch processing capabilities making it a quick and easy way to catalogue and organize thousands of media files in a fully searchable database.
Additionally, it can index files located on fixed drives, removable media (cd, dvd, Firewire, etc), local networks, and on the internet. It also functions as a slideshow program and can display images, movies, and MP3 audio files together within a single slideshow. QPict is impressively fast and extremely reliable which makes it the perfect solution for optimizing and improving your productivity. QPict combines many functions found separately in Apple's iTunes & iPhoto apps into one user-friendly single interface.
"One of the most useful features is the ability to easily keep media libraries streamlined by searching for those annoying duplicate files that tend to sneak up on us over time. I've tried many applications that are supposed to be "dedicated dupe file searchers" but none can measure up to QP. Overall this is an outstanding application which has played an important role in my daily workflow for several years. I hope you find it useful as well. "
I use Downloader Pro to retrieve the images from the card and create the directories, transfer the images with my naming convention and backing the images up to a separate location. Then I use Lightroom to catalog and do basic tweaks.
DLPro uses tokens for creating the job name and all of its naming so I can get the name downloaded and I never have to rename a file. If I wanted I could also covert to Jpg or DNG plus the raw or any combo their of. It will create any directory structure that you could need on any number of locations. There is also a developers kit for creating you own plugins for this app. I could do the same in LR but it is a lot simpler in DLPro. ALso it has input dialogs for adding keyword and other data to the sidecar file unless you use the DNG format where it stores the xif data in the file itself. You also can store the orginal file in the dng file also as an option.
Here's something. It's not really a "software tool" per-say... But rather a collection of free books and films. I've just finished reading and watching most of them And some of them are pretty cool! Check it out!
Question regarding QPict: How big a library can it handle? I actually use Photoshelter to search images because it does a fine job with nearly 400k images. It would be awesome if QPict could do the same.
