Life goes on. I add Arles to the list of IPTC possibilities. This is a tasty little morsel from across the pond. Across the pond from here going East that is. Amsterdam.
What I love about these obscure programs is that they don’t even try to be like Adobe or Corel or ACDSee or anything else you’d recognize. The programmers just go about designing whatever interests them in whatever way they like. And then you can like it too. Or not.
The main screen is a recognizable folder tree and thumbnail browser.
Along the bottom, in plain sight, are the links to the image info boxes. So if you have anything to say about your pictures where to say it is right in front of you.
Why are there two title fields? Title 1 is the same thing as as the IPTC Caption field and Title 2 is the same thing as the IPTC Headline field. ‘Link’ is the same thing as the IPTC Source field. If you’d rather use Jpeg comment, that’s compatible with FastStone. If EXIF interests you, an average digital picture has 90 fields of information attached to it.
The IPTC fields will cover anything you want, as long as you’re working with jpg’s. Yikes, another one of those. It says it also works with tiff’s but not for me so far. The programmer said the IPTC on all my tiff’s is corrupted. They’re coming from Adobe and MediaDex so it doesn’t say much for those two.
You can also use templates for batch modes, similar to Photo Mechanic. Just fill in the various fields that you’re going to apply to a batch and save to use again later. The Next button is handy for cycling through your thumbnails without leaving this screen. Keywords and Categories are under the ‘Surroundings’ tab.
It can also put all your IPTC information (for entire folders) in a .csv file for import into a spreadsheet if you need that sort of thing. It hadn’t previously occurred to me that I might, but now I’ve been offered the possibility…
The other main screens in this program are the Viewer, similar to other viewers (full screen with options to magnify, rotate right and left) and the fully customizable Web Page Creator.
There’s no editor in the way we usually think of photo-editing, but you can link directly to your favorite one through ‘Options’. Pictures here can only be ‘enhanced’ on their way to becoming web albums. And there are a gazillion choices for how to set up your images and your albums.
Without so much as a thought (since I didn’t know what I was doing and just hit a button or two to find out) it produced this very clean and neat page:
It does whatever it does very very fast. At this point all I’d have to do is find the folder and upload it to the web.
In essence, it can IPTC all your jpg’s in a smooth and stable interface and it can spit everything out in web albums if you want that. Like I said, it’s not your normal fare. At about $85 U.S. it’s pricey for a program that can only IPTC jpg’s (and maybe tiff’s?) and make web albums but it does it so well.
As long as you choose your trial software wisely, (the good stuff) you can’t go wrong. Even if you don’t purchase you get to see what’s around and learn some new things on the way. Then when you do decide on something you’re better informed.
P.S. In the continuing saga of cousin, Sam, and her photos, she did finally manage to sign up at YouSendIt but as it turns out her computer has developed a problem with zip folders. The last I heard she was maybe going to try uploading the photos to a spare camera-card. It’s two clicks so we’ll see. I just didn’t want to leave you hanging there.
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