Managing Photo Libraries: Part 3

Another day, another look at more photo organising software. This time it’s the turn of PicaJet FX and IMatch.

PicaJet FX shows promise. The main screen has a nice clean feel to it. It knows about EXIF and IPTC metadata – although its handling of the latter definitely needs improvement. The developers say that they will be improving the EXIF/IPTC features in the future and plan to make all IPTC fields editable from within PicaJet. The main thumbnail screen pans nicely when rotating the mouse wheel or moving the scrollbar (unlike Adobe’s Organizer, spit, spit), and it also supports hierachical views of Windows folders and categories (which can be built from IPTC keywords). I think that give it another couple of versions, and PicaJet will be a very credible piece of software. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it – but it’s not quite there for me yet.

IMatch – well, what can I say. I’m sure this is a program that you either love or hate. As you might have gathered, I like software that fits my virtual hand like a well-designed tool. One that feels right, one that does its job without fuss, and without trying to impress me with the number of bells and whistles at its command. As you might also have gathered, I don’t think IMatch meets my criteria. If I right-click on a file, the lights in the house dim while a humungous menu unrolls and displays all the possible actions that I can do. Frankly, I have no idea why I would possibly want to do some of these actions. And wait, there’s more – the menus reveal drop downs that stretch out to the crack of doom. I confess I ran screaming from this piece of software and uninstalled it after one day. I’m sure there are many people who worship this program – I just ain’t got religion.