Hello all,
I'm looking for a recommendation on image management software. I know the recommended product is Gimp, but, I'm looking for something on par with Adobe Lightroom for both editing and management. Wondering what other options people are using out there (either portable or not).
A while back I had tried Picassa but was not impressed. Have been using Nikon's picture project, but recently had to rebuild my pc and am finding that the software is no longer supported by Nikon. If nothing else it was very easy to manage albums and do basic photo editing. I mention Lightroom as a friend has recommended it to me. It is a tad pricey so I'm looking for alternatives. Recommendations from this group would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Mark
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Paint.net is generally regarded as one of the best free image software. It's not portable, but is excellent.
I'd suggest the Java app blueMarine, which I'm currently working on making portable. It's fairly early in development though, and guzzles RAM a lot (on a machine with 384MB of RAM, it was using 104MB as soon as I opened it), but these things will be sorted out in time.
As for Paint.NET, it's not image management software, just editing. And also it's .NET based, so it's no go.
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
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Thanks for the clarification. I don't think GIMP is an image management software either, is it?
no Gimp is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program G.I.M.P
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
It's free for home use, and it has a portable version available directly on its site.
I've just DL'd it - it's PFC! (Pretty Cool)
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm
I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you.
Have a look at XnView. It's what I use. It's a fairly capable image browser, and its editor is pretty good. I mainly use it for cropping images down to 3:2 for 4x6 printing (e.g. at Walmart) or 5:4 portrait for cell phone wallpapers. It's got good touch-up and brightness type stuff too.
I just realized it's not offered up here, but works portably without any adjustments. Just make a folder called XnView under your PortableApps folder, download their ZIP file, and unpack it to that folder, and it should come up in the PortableApps.com menu as "xnview"; you can rename it to XnView or XnView Portable if you like, to make it fit in.
I use this as well.
After you have done what Nathan said above, go into the Tools menu
then Options (or just push the F12 Key) then go to system integration
and choose to save settings to an ini file. De-select all of the other
context menu options.
Next, go to the browser options, then thumbnail options & de-select "enable caching"
It will now be portable.
It can also use Adobe plugins for image editing.
Thanks for the addition. Yeah, forgot to mention the INI thing. I did that, but did not do the cache thing. So I went in there and did it. Though I'm pretty sure *this* XnView on my flash drive has only been used at work, I did see that it had listed some folders on my home computer, so I guess not. But having the cache didn't break its portability before, though I disabled it just to be safe. Maybe you could elaborate on that?
I knew it could use plugins from its own site, but Adobe's as well? That's pretty cool. Are any free, or are they all paid?
I think that you might be correct about the cache, but it saves a lot of wasted space on a pen drive if you disable it.
You can find a lot of good freeware adobe plugins by searching and of course if you have adobe yourself then you can use the plugins yourself.
Here is a good website to start off with free plugins:
http://thepluginsite.com/resources/freeps.htm
Did you know also that there is an addon for GIMP that also allows the use of adobe plugins!
You need to do a google search for it "gimp-pspi-1.0.7.win32.zip"
Edit: try this link
http://www.gimp.org/%7Etml/gimp/win32/pspi.html
Well, my cache was 9.25MB in size, a drop in the bucket for a 16GB flash drive, but an important enough amount for smaller ones, so a good tip regardless. I'm not hurting for the space, but if it runs fine without the cache, I'll keep it off. I can always turn it back on later.
I'll have to look at those plugins later, thanks for linking to them. I don't have any practical use for any of them that I saw, but I did note that one made autostereograms - colloquially known as "Magic Eye" illusions - so that should be interesting to play with. If I could get a wedding/anniversary picture of my wife and I done into an autostereogram and print it poster size, and then frame it, that would be really cool to have in our place. Might cost $30-50 to print and another $20 to frame (cheap poster frame from Walmart) but to have a unique print guests will look at every time they visit, would be worth it. (She already wants a poster of our virtual band in Rock Band.)
Actually, I play an antique 1972 Harmony archback double cut away electric guitar in our local church group.
I've just downloaded this to my MacBookPro and it works okay. But looking at their web site I wonder about it's credentials as an open source product. Although there are Linux, Mac, and Windows executables available there is no mention of source code. Clear use of some open source libraries so it ought itself to be open.
Equally of concern is their pay for licences; anything beyond hobbyist use and they expect a fee (per machine). Using it portably might strictly require payment for each and every machine on which it is used.
There's also a few bugs. Most serious block for me is that it does not recognise the network broadcasts --- my photo library is mounted on an NFS server and that does not show up in their selection dialog box.