No matter what some people may say, we're living in a visual age. Images are a really important part of the Internet, and our daily memories find a good place to stay on our computers as digital images. Of course that the amount of pictures from our hard drives can grow to insane numbers, and their management becomes something really hard to do and, most important of all, time consuming. No, unfortunately, there's no fairy available that can give you back the lost time, at least as far as I am aware, but there are enough software products that can help you manage your photos instead...

Even better than in my wildest dreams, the program I have found today is completely free to use, so all that's left is to see if it is worth your time or not, but before that, there is some general information about it waiting to be made public...

OpenImageManager is the name of the program I am talking about, and its latest version is 1.5. As I already told you, you don't have to worry about any costs, because this software is released under the terms of the GPL license. Its setup package has 1.2MB in size and installing it is a child's play. These being said, the time has come to move on and tackle the interface and features as usual.

Without the smallest doubt, this program looks good. Despite the fact that I wasn't able to spot any shiny graphics here, everything looks clean and well organized, making this program easy to use. You can't get lost here, because the main menu, the address bar, the folders pane and the files preview area are the only elements of the main window. There aren't any skins available, and you can't change the color of the interface, but I am sure that its neutral light gray gradient won't bother 99.9% of you. OK, we checked the interface, and now the time has come for the program's features...

First of all, I want to know what file types are supported by this program. Good idea, but this is not so easy to find out, because the Help file is less than basic, there is no Open feature so I can look there, and the website didn't clear things much either, but as far as I can tell you after using the program for a while, most usual file types shouldn't be a problem for OpenImageManager, and in the near future, TGA and PSD files will also be supported. Since most people save their pictures using the JPEG format, file support is not my main concern here...

You won't get to award ratings and associate keywords or descriptions to your pictures with this program, but you can manage your image folders easily using tabs. Yes, you got that right, tabs! You can open as many tabs as you want, and if tabs are not enough, you can use the Favorites feature. Just open the Favorites menu and you'll be able to handle things by yourselves, I am sure of that!

When opening a new folder, the program scans for images and generates thumbnails, but I found this process to be painfully slow for average size JPEGs (around 1-2MB in size), and this can become a real problem when you have a folder with over 3000 images having 3GB+ in size together...

The full screen viewer is a really basic one, allowing you to view the images as slide show, change the zoom factor and use the current image as desktop wallpaper.

Things don't stop here, and the last feature I will tell you about is maybe the most interesting one - Web Album Generator. This one comes in two flavors: basic and advanced. The difference is that the basic one doesn't need any user interaction, creating a web album using the pictures from the currently open directory, while the advanced one gives you a wizard-like interface that enables you to choose advanced settings such as page title, thumbnail size or gallery theme. Really nice, but now the time has come to draw the conclusions and check the screenshots!

The Good

OpenImageManager claims to be a free alternative to ACDSee, and despite the fact that a long road lies ahead until this will be true, its ease of use, good features and the fact that is completely free can help a lot.

The Bad

Everything I wish at this time is to see this program moving the way it should, and that is much faster! A better documentation would also be great to have.

The Truth

OpenImageManager may not be the best freeware application that I have ever seen, but it's one worth trying for sure, so if you can find some time, go ahead and give it a spin!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: