Other software

In here you’ll find a list and a small description of the software which can become handy when dealing with digital photography.

• URL : http://www.acdsystems.com/
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : $49.99

One of the most well-known image viewers. It has been in existence more than 10 years, written first for Windows 3.x. It serves not only as an image viewer but also as an image organizer. Fairly complete, maybe too much, as it has a tendency to be a bit of overkill when you just want a viewer.

• URL : http://www.irfanview.com/
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : Free (at least for non-commercial use)

A very quick, very lightweight image viewer which supports a lot of formats. Can be used to do some simple batch processing.

• URL : http://www.xnview.com/
• OS : Microsoft Windows and Unix
• Price : Free (non-commercial on Windows and for every kind of use on Unix)

A full-featured image viewer/browser, but still fast. Can do batch processing, basic slide show, simple edits.

See the image editing article.

• URL : http://www.canon.com/
• OS : Microsoft Windows (MacOSX ?)
• Price : Free (part of the Canon camera software bundle)

The first contender in this category is the software included in the CD given with the Canon cameras. It’s fairly easy to use, gives rather good results in a reasonable amount of time. Its strength is also its weakness. Since it’s easy to use, it doesn’t give you fine control over your result to tune it and get a great image. Nonetheless it’s a very good choice to set foot in the world of panorama photography.

• URL : http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
• OS : Microsoft Windows & Unix
• Price : Free (GNU GPL)

Hugin is a graphical front end to 3 main tools (autopano, panotools and enblend, all included with the install program) which are made to assemble pictures and seamlessly generate a panorama. It’s fairly easy to use once you read the tutorials, but for the complete beginner it may be a bit harder but still manageable. When used correctly, in a short amount of time it’s possible to generate high quality stitches. Its strength is not only the quality of the result, but also the fact that you have total control over all the steps required to make a panorama. Its weakness is that control means it can be intimidating for a total beginner.

• URL : http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : Free Demo (Non-Commercial Use)

Autostitch is the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. Autostitch is built using cutting edge research from the AI lab at UBC, but it’s incredibly simple to use! Just select a set of photos, and Autostitch does the rest: digital photos in, panoramas out.

• URL : http://www.all-in-one.ee/%7edersch/
• OS : Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Java
• Price : Freeware

Panorama Tools possibly is the most powerful set of tools to bend, correct, or stitch images. It was developed by Professor Helmut Dersch of Hochschule Furtwangen University. The software is very powerful and not easy to use so be advised to study a few tutorials (e.g. at panorama tools wiki or use one of the graphical front ends:

• PTMac (Mac OS X)
• PTgui (Windows)
• Hugin (see above)

• URL : http://www.breezesys.com/Downloader/index.htm
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : $29.95

Allows you to download automatically from many cameras and cardreaders, very un-intrusive, quite fast. May not give the best quality/price ratio to download from a cardreader, but very handy to download from a camera. You may have to download version 1.62 because as of this writing version 1.70 has some bugs with Canon dSLR.

• URL : http://www.nabocorp.com/cam2pc/
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : 25€/$30 or freeware

Allows you to browse and categorize your pictures, but more importantly it is able to download pictures directly from the camera for a wide range of models, or directly from a card reader. Sometimes hard to make work especially with two different types of cameras (tested with a Canon dSLR and Canon P&S, the required files are for only one of the two cameras at a time).

• URL : http://www.alanlight.com/dim/Dim.htm
• OS : Any with a java run time
• Price : Freeware

A program to copy files from a cardreader onto a hard-drive. Can’t copy directly from a camera.

• URL : http://www.nsonic-net.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=296&Itemid=57
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : Freeware

This is little tool that helps you downsizing images for uploading to a forum for example. You can set a maximum height and width for the images and a maximum size in kilobytes too. JPGCompressor then scales the images down and tries to get the best JPG-quality that is possible for the given parameters. Images can be sharpened after scaling, framed and labeled (a free text with optional shadow).

• URL : http://picasa.google.com
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : Freeware

This is an awesome piece of photo management software. Our friends at Google have done it again. This software will manage your entire photo collection. It enables you to search, add comments to photos, edit photos, and even print photos with some popular web printing services. I would highly recommend this software even for someone who is a professional – it works great for managing photos.

• URL : http://www.fongtech.com/downloads/mp3move.py
• OS : Any (python needed)
• Price : Free

I wrote this utility (written in python) to solve my mini player limitation, it does not support MP3 Tag3v2, only version 1.
For those who use Juice or Doppler, this utility also move all the downloaded mp3 files into the player automatically.
I heard Chris was mentioning about the tag3 issues so I thought this come in handy.
The application does 2 things:
* convert Tag3v2 to Tag3v1, if there is any problem, it will remove the tag completely.
* move all mp3 from a given folder and it’s subfolders to the player.
You will need eyeD3 library from http://eyed3.nicfit.net/ which is also free.
Let me michael@fongtech.com know if you need more help.

• URL : http://www.fotomagico.com or www.boinx.com
• OS : Mac OS X
• Price : $79.00

A program which allows the user to create stylish slideshows with transitions, music background and titles. Slides and titles can be panned and zoomed, slides can be timed to coincide with beats of the background music. Slideshows can be exported as .MOV files, or to iMovie / iDVD.

• URL : http://www.photodex.com
• OS : Microsoft Windows
• Price : $69.95

Slideshows can be generated with background music, and independent slide timings. Not as full-featured as FotoMagico, but runs on Windows. Can produce stand-alone EXE files for simple distribution.

• URL : http://www.microsoft.com
• OS : Microsoft Windows / Mac OS X
• Price : varies on package, but circa $400 as part of MS Office

Worth mentioning, this is the ‘standard’ business presentation package, but difficult to synchronise music to pictures.

Don’t be afraid to try some software - that’s what shareware is all about. You may find your own gem in the process. There are multiple sites for it - here are three well known ones : Tucows, Nonags, SnapFiles

none.