Pictomio: an image viewer with a high coolness factor
Pictomio is a free image viewer which features a slick, modern interface and 3D accelerated browsing of image libraries. It brings together a host of functions for working with images such automatic grouping of images, tagging, image rating, EXIF and metadata editing, as well as image rotation and zooming. Pictomio can also view and manage video and media files and requires a fairly powerful graphics card to run.
In software as in anything, we ideally want to balance both form and function. And although Pictomio scores high marks on both, there exists a good number of more powerful and feature-rich freeware image viewers out there that nonetheless will not hold a candle to this one in terms of sheer coolness and the richness of the user experience. It does come at a cost (will require a powerful graphics card, and is somewhat higher on resource consumption than the average viewer) but if your machine has the resources you will probably love this. Here are more notes on this program:
- The user interface: simply looks good and is definitely the program’s strong suite. Navigation is intuitive and everything is accessible through a combination of tabs (on top, on the side of the screen, etc) and right-click context menus.
- Image browsing: offers thumbnail browsing, film-strip browsing, single image browsing and the iTunes-style carousel browsing, which is somewhat cool but not exactly mind-blowing (and which is presumably why the 3D acceleration is needed). Allows you to sort and/or filter images based on different criteria (see “organization” below).
- Organization: if you are looking for a tool that can best organize a complicated image library this one is on steroids. Pictomio scans a user selected folder initially and immediately sets to work indexing your library and organizing it across different categories and elements. For example, it allows you to classify images into user-defined categories, rate them, flag them as favorites, tag them using multiple arbitrary tags, create albums, browse by medium or by “color mark”, browse by EXIF data, and maintain a shortlist (a basket, if you will) of images to work with. It even keeps a history of performed search queries. You can filter what you are looking at by everything (e.g. date criteria, landscape or portrait, etc.)
Slideshows: you can use the slideshow function just as you would any other image viewer (grab a bunch of images and run the slideshow), or you can choose to specify exactly the display duration for each image, the type of transition used (supports nine different transitions such as Cut, Dissolve, Flip, CrossFade, fade) and the duration of each transition. If you create the perfect slideshow you can save and re-use or re-view it later on.- Metadata: offers a comprehensive metadata editor. Aside from some of the elements mentioned above (rating, category, tags, albums) it allows you to enter annotations and to edit/view EXIF data.
- Editing: this program is not geared towards editing. There is little on offer aside from the lossless rotation and zooming functions; no cropping, no applying of filters, color (or redeye) correction, no on-image text annotation, etc. It assumes that you already have all of these functions using an external image editor.
- Keyboard shortcuts: for the keyboard-inclined, Pictomio supports a keyboard shortcut for most everything you can do with it.
- Memory use: this seems to vary wildly depending on what I’m doing with the program. I’ve seen it go from as little as 3 megs when minimized to as high as 120 megs. Suffice it to say it is somewhat resource hungry.
- Other functions: a color dropper and a ruler to measure image elements. Nice touches.
- Other media support: in theory Pictomio supports video and audio files as well as well as images. However, this seems like an afterthought, as the program is so heavily geared towards images. It seems to be dependent on system codecs, which I try to limit as much as possible, and was not able to play many of my videos.
Wish list
- A pared-down version with lower 3D graphics card requirements: i.e. a version that takes away the carousel view and some of the bells and whistles but maintains the look-and-feel and everything else. Would be great.
- The option to switch off non-image media support (videos and music files) in the settings. Or otherwise remove it as a feature altogether if that might make the program less resource hungry.
The verdict: the bottom line is that I really like this program. Pictomio is geared towards (a) organizing your image library, and (b) providing a cool and slick user experience. This notwithstanding, there are fewer editing functions than you would expect, and you will have to turn to an external program if you want these functions (the excellent – and free – Photoscape is a great option, or see this posting).
My advice is: if you are ready for a new image viewer that delivers a good user experience, and if you have the resources to run it by all means check out this one.
Version Tested: 1.0.15.0
Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, with 1 GB RAM and CPU > 1GHz. Requires a graphics card with Shader Model 2.0 and a minimum of 128 MB video RAM.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 6 megs).
[...] Windows only: Freeware application Pictomio is an advanced photo and video viewer with an emphasis on supplementing your image viewing experience with a strong dose of eye candy. When you first run Pictomio you’ll notice a couple of things: First, it’s a beautiful image viewer, packed with several ways to view, organize, browse, and edit your metadata (it’s not, however, an image editor). The slideshows are attractive and the application focuses on bringing a good deal of 3D goodies to your image viewing experience. Second, because of Pictomio’s impressive graphics, it requires a fairly decent graphics card if you want to get the most from it. As noted in the FreewareGenius post, the video functionality is more of an afterthought, but Pictomio is clearly first and foremost an impressive image viewer. Pictomio is freeware, Windows only. Pictomio [via FreewareGenius] [...]
I am wondering, how does Pictomio compares to the one, that you previously reviews, the one called twins visions?
are the similar?
and if yes, which one do you prefer?
I would like to use one of them, and would love to hear your opinion!
Looks like it’s heavily inspired by Piclens. Even the website looks similar. I personally don’t have that many images on my computer so I’m happy to stick with Irfanview, even more so since Pictomio is pretty much just a viewer and doesn’t offer any edit functions as far as I can see.
My friend who does have a lot of photos tried it and says he will stick with Picasa as he finds it easier to use and does have basic editing like red eye removal.
If you open a local folder in Firefox and run Piclens you get a poor man’s equivalent except that you can’t browse more than one directory. If this weren’t so resource hungry I’d use it – Picasa is too constrained.
@e,
I stopped using Twins Visions for two reasons (1) the beta version was too buggy and I was waiting for a newer version with bugfixes, and (2) I saw on their website that the version I tested expires at a set date, and was waiting to see if it was going to be freeware after that. (Current beta expires Oct 1st 2008).
Twins Visions has advanced editing capabilities and photo sharing, which Pictomio doesn’t, but Pictomio is more reliable and more stable (and is somewhat “cooler” imho).
thanks for the infor, Samer!
I will install pictomio then!
[...] Windows only: Freeware application Pictomio is an advanced photo and video viewer with an emphasis on supplementing your image viewing experience with a strong dose of eye candy. When you first run Pictomio you’ll notice a couple of things: First, it’s a beautiful image viewer, packed with several ways to view, organize, browse, and edit your metadata (it’s not, however, an image editor). The slideshows are attractive and the application focuses on bringing a good deal of 3D goodies to your image viewing experience. Second, because of Pictomio’s impressive graphics, it requires a fairly decent graphics card if you want to get the most from it. As noted in the FreewareGenius post, the video functionality is more of an afterthought, but Pictomio is clearly first and foremost an impressive image viewer. Pictomio is freeware, Windows only. Pictomio [via FreewareGenius] [...]
[...] first and foremost an impressive image viewer. Pictomio is freeware, Windows only. Pictomio [via FreewareGenius]no comments yet.« Dropbox Gadget Adds Your Synced Files to iGoogle [Igoogle] [...]
Why are some people “marketing” freeware as if it were one of their heirloom or private parts?
Can’t we gauge opinions from real experience rather than from infomercial blah-blah-blah?
I use xnView, I like xnView. Why?
Because it’s good enough for me. Has a small footprint, doesn’t require a MIT or Standford graduation to learn how to use it, no jargon, no fancy features either, but robust manager for still and moving pictures in a non-professional graphic environment. Ah, and portable too, meaning multiplatform (OS), multi-device (flash drives, SD, etc), no-install.
Because people have different tastes. Also people don’t want to go installing lots of different programs to find the one that suits their needs and in som ecases we wouldn’t even know about certain programs if it wasn’t for sites like this and portablefreeware.com.
I personally try and use as much freeware as I can but despite trying a lot of the programs recommended on here I always return to the ones I have always used. Irfanview for image viewing and playing media files to preview them, Paint.NET for image editing, PSPad for my text editing (I’m a web developer), Filezilla for my FTP, Pidgin for my IM client, Firefox for my web browser, Antivir for my anti virus, Spamihilator for my spam mail filter, Thunderbird for my email, MediaMonkey for my audio player, uTorrent for my bit torrent client, Img Burn for my CD, DVD burning (I use Mediamonkey for making audio CDs), Izarc for my compression program, Open Office for my office suite, JK Defrag GUI for defragging my system, CCLeaner for removing lots of crap, The KMPlayer for watching video files and Spybot, SpywareBlaster and SpywareTerminator for keeping my system malware free.
And credit where it is due I tried SpywareTerminator and MediaMonkey after reading reviews of them on this site. I started using The KMPlayer after seeing it on PortableFreeware.
I have used programs suggested on this site and given them up as a bad job. XNView was one but thats just because I didn’t like the way it worked not because it was a bad program. BBox Player still has somequirks to iron out, Gomplayer isn’t actually as good as it claims and Pictomio is just a glorified image browser.
I did use Wubi after seeing it on here and am glad I did because Ubuntu is great.
[...] Pictomio: an image viewer with a high coolness factor Author: Samer [...]
Faststone Image Viewer is better and best by far.
[...] Windows only: Freeware application Pictomio is an advanced photo and video viewer with an emphasis on supplementing your image viewing experience with a strong dose of eye candy. When you first run Pictomio you’ll notice a couple of things: First, it’s a beautiful image viewer, packed with several ways to view, organize, browse, and edit your metadata (it’s not, however, an image editor). The slideshows are attractive and the application focuses on bringing a good deal of 3D goodies to your image viewing experience. Second, because of Pictomio’s impressive graphics, it requires a fairly decent graphics card if you want to get the most from it. As noted in the FreewareGenius post, the video functionality is more of an afterthought, but Pictomio is clearly first and foremost an impressive image viewer. Pictomio is freeware, Windows only. Pictomio [via FreewareGenius] [...]
[...] [via - freewaregenius [...]
For me the best is Imagine:
http://www.nyam.pe.kr/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=2
[...] I am always on the lookout for “stylish” image viewing software (e.g. Twins Visions, Pictomio). What’s different about Snapact is that while these programs previously sited tend on average to [...]
X-cellent thanks.