SIMPLE and effective photo review s/w ??

[expatCanuck]

Greetings -

I'd like to be able to do just three things simply, quickly and painlessly (i.e. - free or cheap, ideally avoiding having to Read The Friendly Manual).

1. Load up a directory of Pentax (K200D) RAW files in thumbnails large enough so that I can quickly scan them for potential 'keepers' (typically 0-5 per 100 ).

2. Tag the keepers.

3. Have the program copy (not move) the tagged photos to a specified directory.

This is on my Windoze XP box (tho' if there's a Linux program and/or distro that provides a solution, I'm certainly game).

Thanks kindly.

- Richard

[Venturi]

On linux there's digiKam. It's free and included with most distros. You'll have to do the copy somewhat manually but all from within it's UI.

[Wheatfield]

Adobe Lightroom.
I'm sure that there are free wares that will do it. Faststone and Picassa come to mind, but I'm not familair with either.

[expatCanuck]

Thanks much to you both.

Perhaps I should clarify what I mean by 'cheap' -- let's say $29.99 or less.
(LR is off by an order of magnitude. )

[zplus]

I <3 Picasa

[bc_the_path]

FASTSTONE, without reservation.
For me, this is the best program (freware/donationware) for doing the things you listed.
I have tried many others for quite long periods and I think FastStone is simply a different animal!

[dosdan]

Xnview (freeware). You can set the thumbnails to whatever size. I'd suggest a row of 8 along the top. If you click on one on the top (or move along using right-arrow) you see its large preview down the bottom with tabs along the top of the preview to see EXIF, Properties, Histogram etc. Small enough to run from a USB stick. Doesn't need to write to the registry. You can copy an installed version to a USB stick.

You can copy/move selected or tagged files.

Selecting=click on thumbnail or ctrl-click if more than one.

Tagging=spacebar to bring up tag boxes on the thumbnails, spacebar again to toggle tagging on an individual thumbnail.

You then either right-click and select either Copy/Move to Folder or use the Alt-C/Alt-M hotkey. It asks you ( (only asks if you pressed spacebar to enable taggging-mode): Copy/Move: Tagged, Selected, remember choice (don't) ask me again.

You can also perform multi-step batch operations on selected files e.g. resizing, gamma correction etc.

Double-click to open up a a thumbnail for full attention (cropping, filtering, colour adjustment etc). Yo can send a file to an associated program using an F1-F4 hotkey. I send to Pentax Photo Lab & The GIMP.

See http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/p...fo-xnview.html to configure it to show EXIF info in diiferent sections of the program.

You can also move the separator between the thumbnail & preview area all the way to the bottom so you could run huge thumbnails (up to 2048x2048) and hide the Preview area completely.

With RAW files, you can configure it to show the embedded JPEG file instead, which speeds up displaying multiple RAW files.

[expatCanuck]

Originally Posted by bc_the_path

FASTSTONE, without reservation.
For me, this is the best program (freware/donationware) for doing the things you listed.
I have tried many others for quite long periods and I think FastStone is simply a different animal!

Ummm ... yeah, FastStone is the bomb! Just what I was looking for.
(And noticeably faster than XnView on my not-so-spry 1.8 GHz Athlon 64 3000+ w/ 1GB RAM.)

Thanks.

- Richard

[rfortson]

I believe the Pentax Photobrowser software the comes with the camera will do that.

[Frogroast]

I'll second Picasa3 and Faststone, and add Irfanview to the mix. All excellent programs, free, and worth trying out.

[maxwell1295]

Viewing K20D PEFs with FastStone is instantaneous. It's an important part of my work flow. I use it to cull the files I don't want to import into Lightroom. I can view the images full screen without having to wait for them to load.