Digital Focus: Dress Up Portraits, Slow Down Shutter Speeds

Dave's Favorites: View JPEG Images on Your Palm Handheld

It seems that many digital photography fans are also PDA users. After all, a gadget is a gadget, and digital photographers like us tend to enjoy electronic gizmos. If that sounds like you, here's a new way to help your Palm handheld and your digital camera work together more effectively: JPGview.

JPGview is a great little image viewer for Palm-powered handhelds with a memory expansion slot, such as the Palm m500 series, the Sony Clie, and the Handera 330. Unlike most image viewers for the Palm that force you to convert images into a special file format for your handheld, JPGview displays real JPEG images, fresh off your digital camera or PC hard disk. The program works with both gray-scale and color devices.

There's a lot to like about this little program. You can store lots of images on a single Secure Digital card, for instance. I found I could fit about 1000 Palm-size images on a 16MB CompactFlash card, for instance. If you don't want to convert the images first, that's okay too--as long as your camera has a CompactFlash slot, you can just pop a card out of your camera and put it directly into the handheld. Many digital cameras embed exposure information and a thumbnail of the image in JPEG files, and JPGview can display that on the Palm as well. The thumbnails are particularly handy because they display very quickly on the Palm.

The program costs $12 and is available directly from its author's Web site. You can also find it at the PalmGear site.

If you have a Palm device with a memory slot, it's a top-notch way to take your images on the road.