ImageBrowser

Today has been a good day for adding new applications to my Dock. There are times when I search in general to see if something interesting has came aboard but I finish by downloading only pathetic excuses of applications that not only have absolutely no practical use for me, but are useless in general. Well, today I have found ImageBrowser and it made my day a little better. A ray of light made its way from the winter darkened sky and shined on my keyboard.

Yeah... I am exaggerating a little bit. It's not that big of a deal actually, but ImageBrowser is certainly welcome into my Dock. The fact of the matter is that I work a lot with pictures (and I mean a lot) and besides professional image manipulation, I have a lot of rudimentary tasks I need to perform like simple image browsing, resizing and renaming. "Preview" has its qualities, but it does not really offer what I specifically need and any other such application that I would even consider of keeping, hasn't yet come across.

Well, ImageBrowser offers me almost everything I need so that my day-to-day work would be a little easier, and until I find something that would fully suit my needs, I am pretty sure that I will do a good work with it; but still, it has many, many things that it misses.

Looks and Features

Well, I don't think that they could have made it look simpler than this even if they would have tried it. Toolbar on top, image browser on left and preview frame on right. Nothing spectacular, not even something that would make me say... "hmmm, nice". In general, simpler means more practical for me and I really prefer an application to be as simple as possible... but not this simple. For example: I wouldn't mind having the possibility to move an image without having to open a Finder window. Basically, what I mean is that another frame that would contain the folders displayed in a tree form would be of great help... to me at least. What I also didn't like is that in the view frame, the pictures and movies are shown in the top-left corner. They should have been centered or at least this option should have been included.

Going trough its features, I found some really nice ones. Basically, the strong points of ImageBrowser are that it can make thumbnails for every picture in the selected folder and subfolders and can "batch rename". And... that's it. The fact of the matter is that these tumbnails that ImageBrowser creates can be very useful when browsing many images and it really helps me even if other applications can do it too. ImageBrowser can do them at command in three ways. One possibility is to make thumbnails for the selected items, for all the images in the current folders or for everything in the selected folder and in its subfolders. The problem with the last one is that the subfolder contains other subfolders, that contain other subfolders with lots of images, then ImageBrowser takes its toys and goes home, meaning that it "quits unexpectedly".

The "batch rename" option though is really nice for some mass-renaming and this is what I really need the most apart from the easy browsing option. The renaming can be done in two major ways and is nicely customizable. First, one can choose its format, BasenameNumber.ext or NumberBasename.ext.. After this, one chooses the Base Name, the extension, (if they want to change it, if not they can use the existing one) the start number, the incrementation and the leading zeros. Also, a preview of how the names will be changed is provided. For me, it proves an extremely useful feature as renaming of multiple images is always taking a lot of my time. The problem is, that this form of "batch rename" misses something. This "something" is the possibility to modify the name of multiple images by adding or deleting something inside the string of characters that it already has.

For example I have pictures named: Apple_large_touch ipod1, Apple_large_nano ipod3, Apple_large_shuffle ipod8, Apple_large_nano red ipod15, Apple_large_video ipod22.

I need to erase all the "_", change "large" with "small" and put a "~" between the name and the numbers. This I can not do in ImageBrowser because I need to keep all the different models' names and the numbers are not incremented by a constant. Well, I know that this would have been a little complicated to do, but it would have been nice. The possibility to view video content and "batch rename" every media file is also something many other applications can't do, although "batch renaming" video content doesn't sound as such a necessary feature. I don't think that there are so many out there that have to rename 500 clips with the same name and different numbers, unless they own a porn website and split a big movie in 100 little ones that need renaming.

The rest of the features are not that special as they are kind of standard. Rotate, Zoom and Arrange by: size, name, creation or modified date, as well as defining other editors that can be accessed quickly are not so unique features. These features, however, are useful only when browsing as no changes can be made to them.

And this gets me to the biggest problem it has. Other than the names, ImageBrowser doesn't make any modifications to the content. You can rotate an image but you can not save it and the most important problem, for me at least, is that it has no resize options. One can zoom, but ImageBrowser does not offer the possibility to resize an image based on its dimensions or its resolution, not to mention that it can not permanently modify it. Launching another application for that does not really make my work easier, as I can do that without Image Browser.

Working with it

As far as the way it handles itself, ImageBrowser has its strong and weak points. Its strong point is that the browsing of images is easy and practical because it makes thumbnails to every image and when browsing a great amount of content with strange names it is really helpful; so as far as the browsing goes, it's almost perfect. As far as everything else goes, well...

It offers the possibility to save different layouts, but it does not offer the possibility to set a default one, you have to change them every time you open ImageBrowser. Also, one can open multiple windows of Image browser, but why didn't they integrate the possibility of multiple browsing panes in one window?

It offers the option to bookmark some folders, but they disappear after a while, so I don't see any use in that. I spent quite some time with it and still haven't figured out how do these bookmarks get to be saved permanently. I think that one has to add the current folder as a bookmark and then click edit, at least that is how it worked in my case. Simply adding the bookmarks was not enough as they weren't stored and I think that either it is a bug, either the developers had some ideas that I don't quite understand.

The way I figured, it has plenty of problems, problems that could have been fixed as they are not really major one. They are minor details that start aggravating those that use it; I, for one, was pretty aggravated when I had to redo all the settings every time I opened the application. The bottom line is that it does a little more than the "Finder", meaning that it offers the possibility of viewing media at a higher resolution and give previews to every image in the current folder, but it doesn't do much else. If it would have had some basic editing options of its own, it would have been great.

The only thing that keeps it on top of others is the "batch renaming" option, and... guess what? That is exactly what I need. That is why I was so excited at first about it. Maybe in the future, ImageBrowser will have more useful features and I could make it the default application I use in the day-to-day routine work I have to do, but even if I have to use other applications to edit my images, for browsing and renaming I'll use ImageBrowser for now.

The Good

As I've already pointed out, ImageBrowser presents nice browsing of media content qualities and for some (me for example) it can be very useful with its renaming abilities and more customizable options.

The Bad

It still needs a huge amount of work and refining. It has some glitches that could have been fixed and as a personal opinion, it could have used a little more testing before it was released. It lacks many features, those for editing images for example, that would have made it a great application, and it should offer more renaming possibilities as this is obviously its strongest selling point.

The Truth

Even if it needs more than it has, what it has is close to what it should be and that makes me want to have faith in it; and I do. ImageBrowser can offer a solution to many people's problems, but it needs a great amount of work, love and care, if I may say so, in order for it to be the ideal media browser.

For some screenshots, click on the thumbnails: