Dave's Favorites: Cool Thumbnails With Photo Shaman

If you ever make thumbnail-sized versions of your digital photos--for a Web site, perhaps, or for photo album software--you will be very interested in a clever little program called Photo Shaman.

Photo Shaman, from Brave Orange Software, can take entire folders full of pictures and resize them down to any dimension you like. "Big deal," you say. I'd agree, if that's all it does--pretty much any decent image editing program can do that. But Photo Shaman goes much further: It can also embed your thumbnails inside a staggering array of miniature picture frames. There are all sorts of creative frames in Photo Shaman: colorful 3D frames, beveled frames, ragged edged frames designed from masks, frames with drop shadows, and more. I played with Photo Shaman for an entire afternoon without exhausting all the possibilities.

The program is powerful but simple to use. It can drop all of your resized, framed thumbnails in a single folder to make it easy to add the images to your latest project. To try Photo Shaman for free or buy it for $45, just go to the Brave Orange site.