The Specialists
Digital photographers, particularly those who perform specific tasks over and over again, will benefit from using single-purpose photo utilities, many of which do their thing better or faster than comparable features in the all-purpose suites. Here's a rundown of our favorites.
Organize
Name Dropper 3
$15 until January 1, 2005; $20 thereafter (free trial)
Do you have thousands of pictures with obscure, camera-generated names such as DSC_72455.jpg and IMG49490.jpg? Name Dropper lets you apply industrial-strength naming power to your photo archives. Assign names to Name Dropper's dozen configurable buttons with a quick right-click, and then browse your pictures and click the buttons to assign names. By clicking multiple buttons you can create complex names, such as "Company Picnic--Sally" and "Company Picnic--Bill." You can save even more time by preserving useful Button Templates and loading, as needed, the appropriate template for different sets of pictures.
Picasa 1.618
Free
Picasa is so effective at locating photos that Google bought it to incorporate it into its Blogger service. Picasa's timeline mode displays your images in a fluid, spinning chronological carousel. Browse the display until you find what you're looking for, and then click to open a set of pictures; or drag a timeline pointer through a histogram that shows your pictures on a scale from oldest to most recent. As you find pictures that you want to edit, print, e-mail, or share, click the Hold button to keep them in the on-screen Picture Tray; there, you can operate on all your favorite images at once.
Use Picasa to quickly find image files that you want to open in another program. Send the pictures to the Picture Tray, select them by dragging the mouse around them, right-click, and choose Locate on Disk. Picasa will open all selected photos within their respective folders on the Windows Desktop--ready for business.
Preclick 2.5
$20 for Preclick Gold, free for Silver
Preclick is another outstanding photo organizer--its PhotoBack pane displays important information about the current picture (such as date, caption, and people) beside the image, and you can instantly search your entire photo library for any keyword. Take advantage of Preclick to establish a logical workflow; when you find the pictures that you want to print, click the printer icon. The images accumulate in the printing tab, so you can later print them all at once.
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