ViewIt is, according to the software’s home page, a “very fast and intuitive picture viewer” that “allows efficient image organizing, printing, slide shows,” and “supports many digital cameras and raw formats,” along with including “many image processing tools built-in.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see all that, my first thought is similar to “wow… that sounds like a really good program. I might just be able to get rid of a couple programs I already have installed if it’s as good as advertised.” And the price – only twenty dollars – seemed right, so I headed over to the website, gave it a download, and took a look.
And it’s interesting. It’s definitely a more capable (and convenient) image browser than that offered by the default OS X install. There’s nothing wrong with the built-in viewer (called Preview), but ViewIt definitely has more features, and more features close at hand. Rotating, zooming, flipping horizontally or vertically, slide shows… all these options are located in a handy little tool bar that, when not in use, slides out of the way.
Also available, via the menu system, are additional tools, such as the ability to convert your images to different graphic formats, create a web page or contact sheet out of your photos, get Finder previews or email your images, all right from within ViewIt.
As I said, it’s a very powerful program, especially considering the small download and speed at which it launches and shows me preview thumbnails of my images.
It’s not perfect, however (but what software is?). As easy as it is to scroll through hundreds of photos, with the thumbnails repositioning and resizing depending on how wide or narrow I stretch the window, there’s still something missing, and that’s an easy way to categorize the images. Sure, I can fool around with the “Library” offered by ViewIt, but it doesn’t seem to give me as many options for dividing the library into smaller chunks, such as the Album idea offered by iPhoto.
I can, however, take any number of photos I want, highlight them, and save that as a photo list, which – when double-clicked – opens up ViewIt, and shows only that set of images. That’s a nice feature (a similar feature can be found in JetPhoto Studio), but be warned, if the photos in your photo list aren’t a part of your ViewIt library, or if you delete them from your hard drive, they’ll no longer be visible. The photo list is only that – a list – and not an archive of your images.
Another nice feature is the ability to create web pages. If you want to create a set of pages out of all your images, simply click the Tools menu, and navigate down to the Create Web Pages option. There are dozens of tweaks you have control over, but I found that simply selecting a name and hitting enter gave me a nice web page, including thumbnails (so that your full-size images aren’t all loaded at once), along with scaled down versions suitable for the web.
Or, if I so chose, I could decide to have all my images uploaded to the web at their full size. Creating a set of pages at smaller sizes took about ten seconds, while a set of pages with the images at full size took perhaps twice as long. Either way, the simplicity of this, and the speed, make it a very nice feature. Perhaps the web pages created by ViewIt aren’t as flashy or “web 2.0” as the ones created by the newer Apple products, but for ease of creation and flexibility, it’s a hard feature to beat.
There are dozens of features in ViewIt, and I’ve only touched on some. At the end of my playing around with it, I found I had mixed emotions about ViewIt. I had been hoping for something that could act as a total replacement for iPhoto, and for many people it likely can. For me, absolutely. I don’t have a digital camera, and only save a small number of photos. For others, such as my parents, who now have an iPhoto library numbering around 8,500 images, ViewIt wouldn’t be what they need. Not that any one program should be the be-all, end-all for everyone, of course. And for twenty dollars, it’s definitely a good deal. So go ahead, give it a download and try it out.
