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Monday, August 16, 2004
Software to Organize Your Images---BreezeBrowser
by Patty Hankins
One of the challenges of either switching to digital cameras or digitizing film images, is finding the file to be worked on. With prints or slides, just search through the piles until the desired image is found. When the photo files are on the computer, it can be a very different story. You're likely to have a large number of files, stashed into a directory called My Photos. To make matters worse, if the files come directly from a digital camera, they have names such as "DSC0279.jpg" or "CRW_7004.crw." So how do you know which one is the one you really wanted to work on?
For us, a piece of software called BreezeBrowser, available from Breeze Systems (www.breezesys.com) helps us deal with the piles of files on our hard drives. BreezeBrowser is sold primarily as a Canon digital camera RAW file converter. The RAW files are compressed versions of the raw sensor output from the camera. For the RAW files to be usable in editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop, they need to be converted into another format. BreezeBrowser does an excellent job of RAW file conversion. Since we installed it, we have not bothered to use Canon's own RAW file software. If you shoot Canon RAW files, you really need to check out BreezeBrowser.
For people who don't shoot Canon RAW files, BreezeBrowser can still be a handy tool for the digital darkroom. The program has a file-manager interface for clicking on a directory and displaying a set of thumbnail images of all the photos in the directory (including Canon RAW, .jpg, .tiff, .png, and .psd format files). Set the thumbnails to extra large for a workable contact sheet on the monitor to view photos. Double clicking on any of the thumbnails will show a larger version of the image, complete with the file EXIF data and a histogram of the red, green, blue, and overall luminosity levels.
The image can also be viewed at 100% magnification. The file-manager interface allows batch copying, moving, or deleting files. It has a handy "tag" which allows for marking which photos are "keepers." It even provides for batch file renaming, so those weird file names assigned by the camera don’t have to be kept.
We have found this program extremely helpful for the file viewing and management functions described above. BreezeBrowser is also notable for two other functions.
- First, it allows for the production of professional looking contact or proof sheets on the photo printer. This function is great if a paper copy of the files is desired for future reference.
- Second, this program may be used to create a set of web pages based upon your photos---it will even resize and do minor batch editing of the images to make them web ready. We have found this function extremely handy when needing to go directly from shooting to having a hundred or so photos up on the web in the same day.
The program has a variety of templates usable for web pages, or you can design your own templates. Unfortunately for the Mac fans, the program is only available for Windows (98, ME, NT4, 2000, and XP). However, for Windows users, this is an excellent program, and we consider it well worth the price of $44.95. If a basic program for managing your digital photo files is needed, we would highly recommend BreezeBrowser.
Copyright Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence. Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence are the co-owners of Hankins-Lawrence Images, LLC, a digital photography company based in Maryland.
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