If you’ve ever been on the National Geographic Photography site then you already know that they feature some of the best, high quality photographs to be found on the internet. What you may not know, however, is that the site has a special wallpapers section, and that the majority of images in the Photography site are available for download in wallpaper sizes (with a maximum width of at least 1280 pixels for most images, and some are available at 1600 pixels).

Note that there are in fact two different National Geographic URLs with two different wallpaper sections, here and here.

I recently stumbled on a wallpaper image from the National Geographic Photography site, completely by accident, and then went on to discover nothing less than a treasure trove of desktop wallpaper images.

Max Wallpaper size: 1280 pixel width vs 1600

It took me a while to figure out why it was that some images where offered at a max of 1280 pixel width while others at 1600 pixels. I finally found out that in fact there were TWO National Geographic URLs that offered downloadable wallpapers.

(1) The images from the http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/ site went up to a max of 1280 pixel width (and sometimes only to 1024), even in its Wallpaper section. Images in galleries will have a little “Wallpaper” download button on the bottom left (see screenshot to the right). Here are some interesting galleries from this site:

• Photo of the week
• Photo of the day archive
• Photo of the day: best of 2008
• Photo of the day: best of 2007
• Note that there is a “Photo of the day” gallery for each month; for example Photo of the day: best of October 2009

(2) The other URL is http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/, and only offers wallpaper downloads in its wallpaper section, with a better resolution that above at a width of 1600 pixels.

Use the dropdown on the top left to scroll through different galleries. The download link is below the image (see screenshot to the right).

The verdict: I cannot believe how cool these images are. Enjoy!!.

I’m not sure if most people have a certain topic that they are partial to for wallpaper images, but I know for myself that I generally like expansive landscapes with an awesome sky and (for some reason) a single tree. In fact, I’ve written a previous posting about it which even makes an attempt at a psychological explanation. I also like representations of the globe (see the Desktop Earth post). Bing image search has a "wallpaper" filter that allows you to find wallpaper images for the topic of your choice.

Can I do this with Google?: although Bing and Google both provide size filters that can help you hone in on large images, Bing IMHO has a three-pronged advantage (1) the filters are right there in the sidebar whereas in Google you have to dig for them; (2) the Google filters are much more granular, which can be an advantage, except in this case I like the "wallpaper" size option in Bing, and most importantly (3) Bing’s image results are simply cooler; it seems to be looking for "wallpaper" images as such rather than big images. (Note this is what I found at least for terms I was searching for; make the comparison yourself).

Here’s a step by step.

1. Go to Bing Image Search and type in a topic you like. Make it broad (do not make it too narrow) in order to get a decent set of results. For this exercise I typed in "Tree".
2. Next, scroll down to the "size" filter in the left sidebar and click on "Wallpaper"
3. Check out the set of results.
4. Filter some more: if you like, you can use the other filters in the left sidebar to further filter the results by layout, color, style, etc.

Bonus: once you find desktop wallpapers you like, check out the sites where you found them for other cool wallpaper. For this posting I made two searches for the keywords "tree" and "cloud" and the images displayed above came from this, this, this, and this cool wallpaper site/sources.

I had two reactions here: the first was … wow! cool!. The second, I was initially wondering what the point of this was, exactly. If you are asking the same question, the answer is that this is built to view really large images; which is to say images with enough detail and visual data to make it worthwhile zooming in, panning, and doing all the cool stuff that Seadragon can do. More notes below:

• Fullscreen: can maximize to fullscreen (click on the icon in the bottom right).
• Images: can be used on images found on the web. If you want to use your own images, upload them somewhere first. Remember that its designed to view really large, hi-res images.
• Sharing links: Seadragon will provide a URL that you can send to and share with others.
• Embedding in a website: Seadragon will also provide the code you need to embed the image and in a page. You can modify the code to customize width and height.

See it in action below

Note: I’ve had this image on my hard drive for a while and unfortunately do not remember whence it came; cannot give credit.

The verdict: a nice toy to play with. It is perfect if you have large images that you would like to view or share without making them small and “internet friendly”, and for panoramic images as well. This is also a great way to publish images of artwork, commercial brochures or scientific images that may be rich in both visual information and text.

Compatibility: a modern browser.

Go to Seadragon.com.

If you post images on the internet you know that in most cases images need to be resized for optimal viewing in a browser and the compression quality adjusted to make the file sizes smaller and faster to download (my preferred settings, for example, are a width of 800 pixels and 80% quality setting). Dropresize is a program that provides a simple way to perform these adjustments on images simply by moving them to a designated folder. Here are more notes on this program.

• How it works: Dropresize is a background app that lives in the system tray and monitors a designated folder on your hard drive. Once it detects images moved into that folder it automatically resizes them based on your size and quality settings. (Note: max resize is 1600 pixels, and images smaller than your defined resolution settings will not be enlarged).
• Settings: users can specify desired height OR desired width in pixels, as well as the compression quality settings.
• Supported filetypes: at the moment of this writing only Jpegs are supported, but it seems there are plans to support other image types.
• Portable: unzip and run. No install needed. If you want this app to be launched when you boot into Windows you need to manually add it to the startup folder (found in the Windows’ start menu).
• Memory consumption: this is a MS .NET app and therefore memory consumption can be somewhat unclear. I believe its takes about 15 megs in memory, which is not that much but not quite lightweight.

Wish list: I could go on and on with ideas to make this better, but will make it brief

• Auto rename: automatically adding a prefix or suffix to the file names; such as appending an “_s” to the filename fo example to indicate that it is a resized version.
• Multiple profiles: for example having one folder resize to width=800 and another to width=200 (for thumbnails), etc.

The verdict: while there are many ways to resize images in batch, the “designated folder” concept employed by Dropresize is both innovative and appealing. The program is still in beta and my guess is that it will be improved greatly, but at what it does Dropresize works really well. If you frequently have to resize images for the internet then check this one out for sure.

Version Tested: 0.1.3b

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Requires Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer. (This is already pre-installed in Vista).

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 22.99K).

As your image collection grows you may have noticed that although it is taking more and more space on your hard drive, yet ironically you seldom get to actually look at your pictures. Wouldn’t it be great if you could integrate your images into your desktop and screensaver so you could actually get to see them? If this sounds like something you want then read on.

There are three types of toys that this program offers:

1. Dynamic wallpaper (”collages”): these consist of a backdrops with three “postcards” overlayed on top where PhotoJoy will randomly shuffle pictures from your collection.
2. Photo widgets (which it calls Photo Toys): reminiscent of other desktop widget engines (e.g. Klipfolio or Vista’s built in widgets). There are 5 variations on this in the version I tested that feature animation and interesting transitions (see screenshot to the right). The downside is that these seem to consume too much CPU power, so I would use sparingly and only on powerful PCs (see CONS section below).
3. Animated Screensavers: I’ve seen screensavers based on images before, but must admit that these are very interesting and the range of different screensavers on offer is impressive (screenshot on top left of this post).

Here’s a list of PROS and CONS:

PROS:

1. An excellent range of choices; many “toys” that you can download and use
2. The screensavers: very cool and smoothly animated
3. The dynamic wallpaper “collages” are generally very interesting

CONS:

1. Memory use is approx 40 megs, which is not insignificant. But the more important issue is that this program seems to be constantly using up CPU processing cycles on my PC (about 20%-30%). Upon further investigation I found that it was the widgets (Photo Toys) that were responsible. The other toys were ok in terms of CPU usage. See more on this subject in the “verdict” section below.
2. The backgrounds for the dynamic wallpaper tends to be somewhat, erm… cheesy.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• The ability to create custom dynamic wallpaper would be great, such that you would use your favorite image as wallpaper and overlay it with the postcard style changing images.

The verdict: generally a very good, well made program. What’s interesting about PhotoJoy is the range of options that it has on offer; there are dozens of “collages” and screensavers to choose from and most of them are innovative and well done. On the flip side the high CPU usage for the widgets (Photo Toys) was a deal breaker for me, and I quickly removed these. Unless you have a powerful PC or really want the widgets on your desktop I would skip those and stick with just the wallpaper and screensaver options instead (which to me are the more interesting ones anyway).

Demo video:

Version Tested: build 200956

Compatibility: Windows XP or Vista, graphic card with 64 mb of memory

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 621K for the installer, which will then download more files on installation).

If you’ve ever wanted to string a bunch of images together into an animation then PhotoFilmStrip is for you. Three things make this program notable:

1. It is extremely easy to use. I was able to create a fairly decent film literally within 10 minutes of installation.
2. It is very nicely laid out. The interface design is intuitive and simple.
3. The output videos are smoothly-animated and of excellent quality.

Decisions: part of why this is so easy to use is that the decisions that the user has to make are fairly straightforward, and there really aren’t too many of them. First off you have to add images to the movie, arrange them in the right order, rotate them if necessary, and choose whether you want to recolor them(b&w or sepia). Next, for each image you have to choose the beginning and end state of the camera; i.e. how the camera will zoom in or out. This is the most “creative” part and is done via two rectangles for the beginning and end states (see screenshot above), and is surprisingly simple to do. Lastly, you can type in a subtitle for each image (which is optional) and specify the duration in seconds that each image animation will occupy within the movie. You will need to make a couple more decisions once at the very end once you’re ready to render, including resolution, output format, and whether you would like to add a soundtrack. The program does not support any fancy transitions between one image and the next; all images simply fade in and out of each other.

More notes on this program:

• Subtitles: if you enter subtitles they will be rendered in .SRT format; they will not be “burned into” the final output movie. (Most decent media players, such as The KMPlayer, will be able to play this format of subtitles).
• Rendering the filmstrip: you can use pre-defined profiles in the settings, including DVD and other profiles for different resolutions (can go up to an impressive HD (1920×1080) resolution). I like that PhotoFilmStrip has the Xvid encoder built in and doesnt require the user to install codecs.
• Adding audio: once you’re ready to render, you can add an audio track. If you want to add narration you will need to do some post processing with external programs (e.g Audacity to record and something like VirtualDub or Avidemux to add the new audio track to the video.)

Wish list (or how this program can be even better)

• Support for custom, pre-built transitions: I just had to put this out there, even as I acknowledge that it will add a layer of complexity and that the default fade in/out transition works just fine.
• Burn-in subtitles: the option to burn subtitles in rather than output them in a sperate file.

The verdict: an excellent program that is both powerful and easy to use. You will be up and running creating animations out of your images in minutes. The program may lack some fancy bells and whistles, but the flip side but compensates for that in usability and good user experience. Recommended.

Version Tested: 1.1

Compatibility: Windows, Linux.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 14.9 megs).

Even if you don’t recognize the name you will likely recognize the gestrual paintings of Jackson Pollock, one of the most important and influential American painters of the last century. You can see an actual example of his work in the image on the right above.

Pollock’s painting style (rumored to have been inspired by seeing his father peeing on a rock) is captured to good effect in this web app, which simulates the drippy paint and turns mouse gestures into, erm .. "art". Use the mouse button to change colors.

[Thanks go to my friend Cole for letting me know about this one]

Compatibility: browser based.

Go to the the JacksonPollock.org site.

There are a number of good freeware image viewers/taggers out there, but Viewer2 will immediately impress due to its stylish interface and innovative functions. I would suggest that you view the video at the bottom of this post to get a sense of how this program works and feels; meanwhile here are some notes on this program:

• The interface: there’s not much of it, until you mouse over to the edges of the screen, where you will find all the tools that you need to browse, view and tag your images. But note that in order to really take advantage of what this program can do you really have to become familiar with the different mouse manipulations (e.g. right-click and move to move selected sets of images around – see the video tutorials). You also might want to become familiar with the various keyboard shortcuts, esp. the ones that concern tagging images, as they will make the process super fast and easy. Note that when hovering over any command icon in the interface a text label will show at the bottom of the screen to explain it (although a tool-tip would have been better, I think).
• Grouping images: Viewer2 can automatically group images visually in various "piles". It can group by name, by path, by resolution, by number views, by time/date accessed, by color, and of course by tags.
• Automatic tag suggestions: for quick tagging, Viewer2 can suggest tags based on other tagging activity.
• Film Strip view: right clicking while viewing images displays thumbnail view of all other images in that folder that you can quickly browse through with horizontal mouse movements. A super cool effect (illustrated in the one of the two screenshots on the top of this review).
• Lasso-type tool: an innovative tool that can be used while tagging to select multiple images (alternately you can simply CTRL+click on several thumbnail to select them). In image view mode the lasso tool is there, but this time it serves to quickly zoom into the lassoed area (is that a word?).
• Searching: the search function is one of the most versatile and powerful that you could hope for, offering search by tags, by name, location, size, etc. It is able to field sophisticated queries such as give me the word "bla" with "2007" in the path excluding the tag "wallpaper" as an example (see the manual section for an overview).
• Navigating folders: double click on the viewed image to display the other images and folders in the same location.These will be represented visually in piles that can be hovered over (for more info) or clicked on to access. Alternately mouse over the left side of the screen to access a simple directory listing.
• Customization: most everything about this program can be customized in the settings, from the size of the thumbnails to the way various elements behave.
• Memory use: only 16 megs in memory, despite the nifty, visual pyrotechnics.
• Technical details: IPTC data editing, full Unicode support.

A video of the program in action:

The verdict: I am bowled over by this app. Its not just because of the high coolness factor, which would have been enough to win me over, but also because the innovative interface and process actually makes it super easy to work with tags quickly and effectively. The developer who thought out and built this (and kept it at such low memory usage) did a terrific job! Download and try it you will like it.

[Thanks go to reader Anjan for tipping me off about this program!]

Version Tested: 4044

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, Vista.

Go to the Program page to download the latest version (approx 1.59 megs).

This program is not the most feature-rich freeware screen capturing program out there, it isn’t the most powerful, and it doesn’t have the built-in editors/annotation tools that some other programs have; despite all of this, however, it manages to be an excellent screen capturing program, provides a very good range range of functions, and (most notably) delivers an excellent user experience.

If you’re wondering about “what could possibly be so stylish and cool about this program?”, the answer is in the way the interface is implemented, from the actual capturing process all the way to the (very pleasant) post-capture visual pyrotechnics where the captured image floats on screen and can be moved around and/or manipulated via right-click (check out the video below to see for yourself).

Here are more notes on this program:

• Capture modes: capture full screen (click “PrintScrn” twice), rectangular region, or freehand region of any shape. [Update Sep 14, 09] also supports capture topmost through Alt+PrntScrn hotkey.
• Hotkey: program is activated by clicking “PrintScrn”; you can optionally change it to any other hotkey combination.
• “Annotation”: will let you perform drawings with the mouse on screen right before you capture, which sounds like a great thing but in practice is of little use.
• Delays before capture: right click the PrtScr icon in the system tray to request delays of 5 or 30 seconds (not changeable).
• Editing: there is no internal editor; however, click “edit” and your captured image is opened using your PC’s default image editor. To find a good editing/annotation app and change the default image editor on your PC see this post.
• Multiple monitors: supported.
• Rescaling: (i.e.resizing the image) is possible before saving.
• Title and comment: you can add a title and/or a comment on-the-fly as you capture a screenshot

Wish list:

• More capture modes: specifically, (1) capture active window [supported], and (2) the ability to scroll through capture specific window elements, and (3) the ability to capture a fixed region.
• “Repeat last capture”: an option which I frequently use and need, which PtrScr does not currently offer.
• Magnifier glass: the kind that would pop-up when you’re capturing in order to help you select the area you want up to the exact pixel. Strangely absent.

The verdict: this is the kind of program that you might want to recommend to people who secretly want a Mac, or users who are not too technically savvy (not that I am equating these two groups in any way ). Or you may want to use it alongside a more powerful/sophisticated screen capture program (e.g. PicPick or Screenshot Captor) and set a different hotkey for each so they don’t conflict. Try it out for yourself you may like it!

Version Tested: 1.5

Compatibility: Windows XP ot Vista and a good graphic card.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.35 megs).

SmillaEnlarger is a free, open source program that enables enlarging/magnifying bitmap images in high quality. Based on original algorithms, this standalone software uses a number of filters that are designed to remove some of the typical artifacts generated by the enlarging process and “fill in” image information to achieve a much higher quality image than image enlargement algorithms typically employed in most applications.

If you work with images you will doubtlessly have seen situations where you would have liked to use a larger size image than what you had to work with but was not able to do so because of the quality degradation involved (e.g. pixellization/artifacts/loss of detail). What SmillaEnlarger can offer, in this case, is a handful of potentially very useful filters that can circumventing some of these problems in order to produce a high-quality enlarged version of an image. More notes below:

• How it works: load your desired image, then use the controls on the left hand side to determine the new, desired size of the image (you can set the width/height, move the slider, or enter a value for the zoom % in the box; I set this to 400% in my example shown above). Next use the controls for the five filters on the right to manipulate the image; click “preview” to see the effect this has on the output image. Finally, click “calculate” to process.
• Note on the “zoom box”: the purpose of this is solely to zoom in on an area with a lot of detail/artifacts/noise, in order to be able to visually evaluate what the filters are doing. Actual resizing happens using the controls underneath it.
• The filters: five in total; Sharpness, Flatness, PreSharpen, Dithering, and DeNoise. If in doubt as to which values to use, start with all filters approx set to the middle value (this will likely produce a good result anyway). Experiment by changing and clicking preview.
• Cropping the original image: right click on the original (left side) image and draw a selection with the mouse to crop it.
• Formats supported: JPG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, PPM
• Portable: all you have to do is unzip and run.

Wish list (or how this software can be even better):

• Quick pre/post previews: the option to quickly show the original un-processed preview, and/or flip through the original preview without processing and the new preview post processing. Currently it seems the only way to do that is to click “undo clipping”, which strangely re-sets the position of the zoom box making instant comparisons impossible. Another cool option would be to have 2 windows showing simultaneously for pre/post processing.
• Provide “suggested filter values”: which the program might calculate based on what it thinks is a good starting point. A “reset” button that centers all filter values would be nice too.
• Rename the action button: for some reason its labeled “Calculate”, and it took me 10 whole minutes to figure out that that’s the action button, and I consider myself software savvy. “Go”, “Save”, or even “Process” would have been so much more intuitive.

The verdict: a very nice addition to you image-manipulation bag of tools (especially those of us who are not Photoshop wizards and cannot approximate this function with an arsenal of plug-ins).

Version Tested: 0.8

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 8 megs).

A full fledged image viewer for under 8 megs? Yes indeed. It also provides the usual minimum set of image viewing features such as flipping, rotating, zooming in and out, and saving the image as desktop wallpaper.

A couple of quirky things about this one (which I actually like); the first thing is that images are displayed with your desktop and icons as background, rather than a black screen. The second thing is that you can drag images around the screen as you would any normal window. Not useful for any practical purpose I can think of, but somewhat pleasant nonetheless. More notes:

• All functions can be performed by right-clicking the image or through keyboard shorcuts.
• You can scroll with the mouse to view images that are too big to fit on screen, such as panoramic images (unless you choose fit to window, inwhich case the images will be forced to fit).
• Provides a good range of image resizing algorithms to choose from, if that matters to you.

The verdict: do you want a lightweight image viewer that consumes very low resources yet manages to be somewhat cool? You found it! The only thing I might imagine some people might prefer is the option to blacken the background when displaying images rather than display it as hovering over the desktop.

Version tested: 1.02

Compatibility: Windows XP or higher.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 234K).

Twingly, if you hadn’t hear of it, is a blog search engine similar to Technorati with some underlying technology to eliminate spammy or fake blogs. The Twingly screensaver is a screensaver that visually displays blog postings as they are being published all over the world, twisting and turning a representation of the globe to give you glimpses of the geographic location where the postings are coming from. More notes on this one:

• Browse blog posts: can function as a rather unusual browser for new blog entries (if gazing into a continuous ticker/scrolling list of blog postings can be characterized as ’browsing’, that is).
• ’I’ is for vendetta: no of course its not – silly… it’s for “interactive”; which means you can press “I” on your keyboard then swivel the globe around with your mouse or keyboard hotkeys and/or zoom in and out without shutting down the screensaver. Very cool.
• Clicking a blog entry: will produce a small “summary” window on the right hand side, so you can read it without exiting the screensaver. You can click on the summary to open inside a browser though.

The verdict: I don’t have too many screensaver reviews (I just made a quick check and found only one, MappedUp, which in fact turns out to be eerily similar to this one). My feeling is that if you have to have a screensaver it’d better do something interesting and I think this one is pretty darn cool!

The only negative with this one is that looking at it makes me feel a little embarrassed that I have trouble meeting my self-determined quota of four new postings per week on Freewaregenius (what with all the content being generated every second) .

Compatibility: WinAll. Requires a graphics card supporting OpenGL. Enable Asian language support in Windows for a better experience.

Go to the Twingly Screensaver page to download the latest version (approx 2.09 megs).

Every once in a while I get emails asking me about the "Lightbox" style image viewing I have on this site from people who want to implement something similar on theirs (for the record I use a Wordpress plugin called Shutter Reloaded for this). Generally speaking it is a fairly nice effect, and so the question becomes: wouldn’t it be terrific if there were a Firefox plugin that delivers this function to any image site(s) that you may be browsing? Greased Lightbox is that plugin. Some notes on this as follows:

• How to use: install then browse over to an image site such as Flickr or perform a Google image search. Click on an image then browse the images with the arrow keys. Press "+" to zoom in, "-" to zoom out, "0" for full size, and "x","Esc", or mouse-click on the image to exit.
• Requires the Greasemonkey extension (see "compatibility below").

The verdict: a very nice effect indeed. Not as fancy and ambitious as, say, something like CoolIris (formerly PicLens) and it’s 3D wall of images, but depending on what you like this may be a good thing.

Version Tested: 0.18

Compatibility: works with Firefox with Greasemonkey extension or Safari with GreaseKit or Opera 8+

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 72K).

There are many free screen capturing programs out there; most of these offer the basic functionality and usually do not warrant mentioning in this blog. Not so with PicPick: at least FIVE different aspects of this program make it quite interesting and noteworthy, as follows:

1. Versatile screen capture options
2. Auto-scroll capture (for, say, websites or documents that scroll beyond the visible section of the screen).
3. Built-in integrated image editor
4. A slew of interesting, mini-tools: color picker, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, and whiteboard.
5. A portable version is available.

Here’s a quick overview of each one of the points above.

1. Versatile screen capture options: we’re all acquainted with full screen, active window, user-selected area captures, and even freehand captures, where you “draw” the capture area irregularly on the screen. PicPick also offers a “window control” capture, where you can automatically “hone in” on different areas within a window. Two less common capture modes are fixed region captures (where you specify height and width and move the frame around before capturing), and “repeat last capture” which will guarantee that your capture is precisely identical to the last one in terms of size and placement on screen – both of which can be extremely useful.
2. Auto scroll capture: this one is useful when trying to capture a website in a browser or a document in any kind of window that extends beyond the visible part of the screen. Use the “capture window control” and point to the part of the window that contains the scrollbar.
3. Integrated image editor: these days an integrated editor and/or annotation tool is almost compulsory, as most screen capture programs seem to have it. PROS: quickly perform operations such as resize or crop, nice set of effects that can be applied to selection (e.g. pixellate only a section of the image to hide personal info). CONS: once you add elements there is no way to change them unless you undo and start over. For example if you add a text label and decide that you want to enlarge it and add an outline color, you cannot change the properties of the one you already have but rather have to remove it and start over. (Need a better editor/annotation software? Try PhotoScape).
4. Mini-tools: an interesting and useful selection. Color picker and palette tools (self explanatory), magnifier, pixel ruler (superimposes a semi-transparent ruler on your screen), protractor (for measuring angles), crosshair (for quick screen coordinates), and whiteboard (write/draw on-screen, for presentation or screenshot annotation purposes).
5. Portable version: is available for downloading; unzip and run.

Other notes: supports user-defined keyboard shortcuts, dual monitors, including or excluding cursor in the captured image, and a number of image format outputs (JPG, BMP, GIF and PNG).

The verdict: this program manages to bring together a very nice set of screen capture functions and mini-tools, and provides a very nice user experience (all of this whilst consuming under 6 megs in memory). Very nice indeed.

Version Tested: 1.8.0.9

Compatibility: Windows All.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 1.21 megs).

Travel the world, see sights, become worldly and sophisticated. Yes, you can do all of this with Earth Album. Though you may get a feeling that you’ve seen this sort of thing before (you have, see below), Earth Album manages to deliver a tremendous user experience, and truly a great way to explore the world for those who are interested or curious.

Some notes:

• Click anywhere on the map to display images from that region/country/state. Zoom in to see more map detail.
• Looking for a particular place or location? Use the provided search box. Works extremely well.
• CoolIris Edition: if you have CoolIris isntalled (formerly Piclens, a terrific image-browsing enhancement for IE and Firefox), you’re going to want to check out the Earth Album CoolIris edition.

This site reminds me of a number of services that do similar things that were previously featured on Freewaregenius: Panoye, which offers panoramic images from all over the world, FlickrVision, which displays images as they are being uploaded from random places across the globle, and of course Google Earth a little bit, in that you can navigate a world map and zoom in and out to see pictures.

So, you might wonder, is there room for this mash up of maps and images? You bet. Just try it, it truly is pretty darn cool and extremely interesting!

Compatibility: Browser based.

Go to the Earth Album site.

One thing that never fails to impress me is how much you can reduce the file size of an image (through a reduction in it’s quality) without much of a visible degradation, if at all, in the way it looks to the human eye. In any case if you’ve ever needed to upload an image to the internet or use it on a website you know that its important to reduce the image size to an "internet
friendly" smallish size. This program allows you to do this quickly and easily. It is somewhat similar to previously reviewed "Jpeg Express" in that it allows you to visually preview the changes to the resulting image.

Eight noteworthy features that RIOT has to offer: (in no particular order)

1. Supports JPG, PNG, and GIF: and I don’t take this for granted, since most similar programs are very JPEG-centric, while RIOT allows me to quickly manage all the formats that I need for most of my internet/website related image needs.
2. Compress to specific size: an option from the "tools" menu where you can specify "I need it to be such-and-such K’s in size and it will automatically figure out the quality percentile for you.
3. In-place compare: you already know that RIOT offers before-and-after image previews. In-place compare goes one further by superimposing the before image on the after image. Switching this on and off in succession will allow you to perceive pixel-level differences (if not, try zooming the preview images; you will eventually be able to see differences).
4. Manages PNG/GIF transparencies: quickly set the thresholds of PNG/GIF transparency, or fill in a sold background of your choosing (see image to the right).
5. Auto-rotate according to EXIF data: from the options, you can set RIOT to auto rotate images according to the EXIF data (most digital cameras these days store this information in the image).
6. Supports standard edits: such as rotating, flipping, resizing/resampling, etc. Resample using any of a number of familiar filters (Lanczos3, Catmull Rom, Bicubic, and others). Also allows you to convert across image formats.
7. Portable: simply extract and use.
8. Available as an IrfanView plugin: which you will appreciate if you use that program.

Wish list:

• Batch processing images would be great (e.g. resave a group of images at 80% quality, or at 100K file size, etc)

The verdict: I am giving this a Freewaregenius pick for (a) a very nice combination of features, (b) support for JPG, PNG, and GIF, (c) portability, and (d) a very nice overall look-and-feel and user interface. Its just a very nice program to have.

Version Tested: 0.3.0 beta

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, Vista or newer.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 953K).

When I first downloaded this one I will admit that I did not know what to expect. I knew from perusing the author’s site that Sysygy embeds images in a game-like 3D environment, but I couldn’t help but think "so what?". It seemed like a bit of nice eye candy and, less generously, a mere gimmick.

However, no sooner than I had tried it for myself that I knew what the point was: the immersive 3D gallery environment was very enjoyable. Moreover, it is possible to let other users experience your gallery, such that (at least in theory) you could actually use Sysygy to stage virtual showings of your photos/artwork/favorite images and share them online. In any case something about this program is quite exciting.

Here are more notes on this program:

• Quality: the quality of the images and effects, done with OpenGI, is very high. Lights, shadows, and effects are very realistic and professionally done.
• The virtual environments: the version I reviewed had three to choose from. If you imagine what it might be like to play a first person shooter in an art gallery you’ll get a sense of what these look like, roughly. Some have elaborate descriptions/stories weaved around them (e.g."this small building was built far away from any civilization, on a moon of Jupiter").
• Multi-server mode: Sysygy allows you to set up a server to allow friends to join/visit your virtual gallery and chat with everyone present. I will say that I getting connected could be easier or more intuitive (wished there was a server autodetect or that people could be sent an invite code). Was surprised to see that my entire image collection was downloaded on the remote computer; for one thing it delays the process significantly, takes space on the remote computer, and perhaps I don’t even want my images available on people’s computers.
• The images: can be resampled using a number of filters for higher quality, or simply resized. (I did the latter to conserve disk space, and the quality was top notch nonetheless). You can add a caption to each image that your users can read under the image as they approach it.
• Bots: you can have a user-defined number of bots running around and looking at the artwork (and making random comments on the images).
• After-effects: choose from eight effects such as greyscale (i.e a black and white world, negative, night vision, blur, etc. Kind of cool but somewhat redundant.
• Portable: comes in two flavors, a normal installable version and a portable version that you can simply unzip and use.
• Audio: provides some cool instrumental tracks to accompany your galleries, or you can add your own playlist.
• Customize: you can customize everything about this, including your own bot, the animation speed, resolution, available effects, etc.

How to use Sysygy: there are four executables that work together to create your virtual gallery.

1. Create your gallery: run the "GalleryCreator", add your images, add captions (if you want), then save. Obviously you do not have to do this step if you intend to join a remote gallery.
2. Enter your gallery: run "SysGame", choose "one visitor" if you just want to browser a local gallery or "multi visitor" if you are hosting or joining a gallery that is being broadcast online.
3. Host your gallery: run "SysygyServer" to host your gallery. Should be fairly self explanatory.

Wish list:

• The ability to use images hosted on image sharing sites such as Flickr.
• Making this a web service. Would be very cool.
• No blank pictures on the walls, please: I noticed that if you do not add many pics to your gallery the program leaves blank white rectangles on walls where it would have otherwise placed your images. It really should use the texture from the walls or backgrounds instead.

The verdict: you’ll either like this or not care for it much. I must admit that I am in the former category even as I started out in the latter. The program is interesting and fun and pregnant with possibilities.

Version Tested: 1.3

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP. Vista is not officially supported, though it might work (please report in the comment section if it worked for you!). Officially requires a 3D accelerated graphic card with at least 64 MB video RAM, supports at least OpenGL 1.3 (make sure you have the latest drives installed).

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 37 megs).

This program’s slogan captures exactly what it’s about “No tags. No folders. It just knows”. It is designed for users who may have a huge, untagged, messy image library and need some way to quickly filter through it and find the images they are looking for.

To evaluate whether this program succeeds at what it sets out to do, imagine the following scenario: you have tens of thousands of photos on your drive, but you are looking for one specific one. Say it’s the picture of your nephew that you took of him when you visited New York in August, where as a joke he was wearing dark sunglasses and a hat indoors and looked like one of the Blues Brothers. Except unlike the Blues Brothers he was not wearing a black suit but rather – you seem to remember- an orange shirt or something like that (see the “hypothetical” image below).

Let’s assume further, for the purposes of this review, that you do not download your pictures into any organized folder structure, that you stick with the generic naming scheme your digital camera provides (something like “DC12345″ which does not seem to refer to anything), and that you do not rename or otherwise tag your files once they are donwloaded.

Photology is a program that is designed to find images based on exactly the kind of information available in the example above. I will come back to this example below in the “verdict” section, but for now here are more notes on this program:

• How it works: Photology scans user defined folders on your hard drive recursively (e.g. “My Pictures”, “Desktop”, etc.) to identify and “read” your images. Next it allows you to apply a number of filters to your image library in order to hone in on the image(s) that you seek
• Available Filters: there are 7 groups of filters as follows: time of day (morning/afternoon/evening/night); date (by month, year, or both), features (overexposed/underexposed/vertical/horizontal/in focus/out of focus/black & white/monotone); location (indoors/outdoors); content (plants, sky, faces, beach, flowers, snow, sunset, water); text (a search box similar to most image management programs that looks at file and folder names and – I assume – tags as well); and color (allows you to select from a color wheel of sorts, and finds images where that color is significantly represented).
• Using multiple filters: filters can be “stacked” in order to filter multiple criteria. For example say you are looking for a friend’s black and white portrait you could start with applying a “black & white” filter from the features group, and next, say, filter those results in turn by a “faces” from the content filters, eliminating all images without faces, etc. Overall you can use up to a maximum of six filters together. Note that the active filters are displayed in a column near the right edge of the screen, and that any single filter can be removed by simply clicking on it.
• The user interface: I must say this is truly terrific, and if anything one of the program’s main draws is the ease of use and the nice user experience that it provdies — kudos to the developers for a job well done. The work area is organized into three columns that surround the main thumbnail area on three sides. These are: available filters on the left, operative filters on the right, while the bottom area is where you can work with your “groups” (see below). Hovering on the thumbnail prompts a number of useful commands that can be applied to the image, including a “show in order” command that takes you out of the filtered view and displays the current thumbnail .
• Groups: these are essentially “virtual folders” that you can create and add pictures to. You could create a “favorite” group for example, or a group of images that you need to work with or consider for a project, etc. A rather good organizational tool.
• Other functions: there are a number of functions that can be performed on an image individually when in image viewing mode, including adding a caption, printing, uploading to image sharing sites (Flicker, Picasa, Smugmug, etc.), and simple adjusting (redeye, crop, rotate, and straightforward color correction).

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• Adding the following filters: filter by image resolution and size (would be extremely useful for designers/artists). Also adding “landscape” and “cityscape” filters to the content section would be great, if possible.
• Selecting multiple images: the ability to select multiple thumbnail is strangely missing. To add a number of thumbnails to a group, the user is forced to add each image separately.
• Manipulating multiple images: the ability to perform printing, sharing, and image adjusting functions is restricted to individual images; would be better if some of these could be performed on masse.
• Displaying image metadata: adding the option to display image metadata: e.g. name, path, size, in the main thumbnail display. If not, then having the option to display these on mouseover.
• Adding a vertical scrollbar: currently, scrolling through many pages of image thumbnails is achieved by using a horizontal scroll bar on the bottom of the page. The option to display this horizontally would be great, and much more intuitive IMHO.
• Support for tagging: i.e. adding tags. I know that the whole point of this program is to filter in the absence of tags, but it could also be a great aide for someone who wants to add tags to their image library.
• Support for browsing by folder structure: again, I realize this goes against what the problem is intended to be, but most of use have (and probably want to maintain) some sort of folder structure, and being able to browse that would allow users to use Photology as their primary image viewing program.

The verdict: I would say that there are two kinds of filters that Photology offers. On the one hand there are the mainly technical ones such as date, overexposed, underexposed, vertical, horizontal, black and white, by color, etc. that by are very reliable and mostly do what they intend to do. On the other hand the location, time of day, and content filters, while by and large very impressive, will on occasion fail to perform correctly.

In my quest to find the photograph that I mention in my example in the beginning, I started off by specifying that the image was (1) taken in 2008, (2) was indoors, (3) content=faces, and (4) color=orange-ish, and got… nothing. However, on further experimentation I realized that removing the “indoors” filter instantly displayed the photo in question at the top of the resulting set of images (Photology had decided that the image displayed above was outdoors rather than indoors). Two take home messages here (1) try to use as few filters as possible when searching and go for the most obvious ones such as date and color; (2) experiment with the filters; there will be more than one way to find what you’re looking for.

In closing I will say that this program deserves a lot of credit for its originality, ambition, excellent overall design, and the wonderful user experience which it manages to deliver. Download it today!

Version Tested: 2.0 build 117

Compatibility: Windows XP SP2, Vista.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 11.9 megs).

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then you know that 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 be resource hungry or have high 3D requirements, Snapact does not (uses around 23 megs in memory when running). On the other hand what Snapact manages to do is to retain a pleasing “coolness factor” while offering a lot of nice features both for image manipulation and image management (but especially the latter).

What also needs to be said about Snapact is that it is very much a desktop front-end to the free Snapact image sharing service; which is to say that it is designed for seamless integration with your online Snapact account. Having said that, I also have to note that you can use this program as a local viewer and image management program without signing up or using the online component. I had been using this program as a local image viewer for a week, in fact, before I decided to review it and only then did I sign up for a Snapact online account for the purposes of writing about it. More notes on this program as follows:

• Carousel-style browsing: similar to the famous iTunes carousel, this is not only fashionable these days but rather cool, and the implementation here is a very good one (fast, efficient). When viewing an image all of the other images in the same folder are displayed as thumbnails in the bottom part of the screen and will enlarge in turn as you mouse over them. Or you can simply use the left/right arrow keys to browse back and forth, as you would with any image viewer.
• Image editing functions: rotate, crop, blur, sharpen, brighten/contrast, redeye, adjust tint/color, and negative and black and white image filters.
• Image managent functions: edit or add tags to your images, edit other metadata (including rating, title, description, etc), view metadata (simply hover over any image thumbnail), add to album (an album is a kind of virtual folder or category), synchronize album(s) to your Snapact online account (this is optional), add to mini-basket (a handy work area where you can drag images or other files you would like to work with).
• Smart browsing: the “predefined” album in your list of albums offers browsing by smartlist (recently modified, image size, etc).
• The search box: a fast way to find what you’re looking for. Will look at file and folder names as well as metadata (tags, description, EXIF data, etc).
• Snapact online: once you create a free Snapact account you or any of your friends can log into your page which will have a URL that looks like (www.snapact.com/u/your-username). As far as image sharing sites go Snapact online actually offers a very pleasant user experience. You can surf “recent images”, “recent album”, by tag, etc. and the site offers thumbnail-style views and a page for each uploaded image offering photo and EXIF information. Images uploaded are reduced in terms of their file size and I am unsure as to whether or not there is a storage limit per account (please advise if you have more information).
• Snapact online privacy settings: you can change your privacy settings such that your images are accessible to just you, to just your official Snapact “friends”, or publicly to everyone.
• Panoramic images: I used Snapact to view a folder of panoramic images with some good results (click on the “Full Size” button first, then use the mouse to scroll across your panorama).

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• Mouse-wheel control: for browsing images. Currently the mousewheel is not utilized, which I find a tad surprising.
• Notification when unpublishing an album: stating that this will result in x number of uploaded images being removed from the online account on next sync. Is a good idea.
• Slideshow function: this is conspicuously absent, and while I never cared much for my images being automatically displayed in succession I do think that many users will want and miss this.

The verdict: I will confess that at first I did not intend to review this software, but the main draw for me was the good user experience that it provides. If you are looking for a stylish image viewer with good features that does not hog your system you should check out Snapact; also, if you want a quick and very functional online image synching/sharing service certainly give Snapact online a try (if not, don’t sweat it, you can use Snapact 100% locally without using the online image sharing function).

Ironically, one of this software disadvantages is precisely that since this program is designed as a desktop client for Snapact online it doesn’t support the leading image sharing services such as Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, so if that integration is important for you to have in an image viewer you may want to look elsewhere.

Version Tested: 1.0

Compatibility: Windows XP or Vista.

Go to program home page to download the latest version (approx 1.99 megs).

I will have to admit that the people at Microsoft are coming up with cool free software at ever increasing frequency. Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE for short) is a powerful program that is both elegant and easy to use.

What is noteworthy about this one is that the actual stitching is fully automated without any user input. However, there are quite a number of user interventions that can take place after Microsoft ICE has put the panorama together, ranging from manipulating camera motion (which in fact will prompt a re-processing of the images), zooming or rotating the image, changing the perspective and/or point of view (at least in the so-called rotating motion mode), and finally cropping it.

For the purposes of this review let me note that I was not able to find much documentation/information on the Microsoft ICE page, and therefore all of the information below is based mostly on my experience. Here are more notes:

• The user interface: drag and drop images into the interface or select a number of images and right click “stitch images” in the explorer context menu to process them. The program interface itself is sleek, simple, and highly functional.
• Output formats: “common formats” such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, and PSD (flat or layered) as well as multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom
• Ease of use: you will be generating panoramas quickly and easily, and will be able to intuitively figure out most controls with a minimum time investment. Very impressive for a program of this kind.
• Camera motion: this defines the way in which your images will be stitched together. There are 3 “planar motion” modes, an “automatic” mode and a “rotating motion” mode. The last one is the most interesting and brings with it the option to change the viewer’s perspective/point of view (which the other modes don’t) but is probably best suited for scenes that rotate around the viewer in a semicircle (or full circle). My advice with respect to these different modes is… experiment with them and see what works best.
• Automatic cropping: is a feature that’s worth mentioning; the program will automatically fit the cropping frame such as to encompass the most contiguous real estate in your image. Very useful.
• Performance: is excellent, at least on my machine (and from a very subjective perspective). I used this software to stitch 46 images together comprising 56 megs in total, and it processed them in approx 80 seconds. Different machines will vary of course, but my impression is that performance is very robust. 32 and 64 bit versions are available.

The verdict: Microsoft Research did a great job with this one. I previously reviewed Hugin, another powerful and fairly user-friendly auto-image-stitching program, and would recommend that you look at both of these if you are serious about stitching up images.

However, if pressed to recommend a single program of this type I would probably say that Microsoft ICE might be the better choice for the majority of users; it offers (a) a tremendous user experience, (b) advanced image-stitching algorithms, (c) ease of use and a shallow learning curve, and (d) support for a wide range of formats, including the newer multi-resolution tiled formats. Highly recommended.

Version Tested: 1.0 release 1

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, 32 bit and 64 bit versions available.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 3 megs).