14 DAY TRIAL // Image viewer applications are like Solitaire? there are so many versions out there that it's amazing, and they all do pretty much the exact same thing, the only difference being in the trimmings. At the end of the day, the scope of an image view is to show images, and I must admit that I have never seen one to fail in this respect, although there are some that do a very poor job. However, just like music playing software is expected to do all sorts of other additional things these days, so the purpose of image editors gets expanded. However, for this sort of programs, the developer rather than general consensus dictates the direction the program goes in, resulting in a lot of variety, however most programs are one trick ponies that fall into the oblivion of mediocrity? ImageReel is one such image viewer.
What it does
ImageReel is an image viewer, and as such will let you view images. In addition to this it will also let you create an album for easy sorting and viewing of images as well as offer advanced renaming features.
Picture perfect
Since an image viewer that is bad at showing images is utterly pointless, this is the first thing that I look at. ImageReel performs well here, the images showing perfectly regardless of how I resized the windows and played with the view modes. It makes heavy use of anti aliasing, to ensure that images look right, no matter how small you make them. On the other hand, it will not let toy make the window too small, which goes a long way towards keeping the image looking good.
While image display is fine, image loading leaves a lot to be desired. This is true both for the initial opening of the images as well as for the parsing of the images. The program lags and lurches as it searches the necessary information and opening up one of my medium sized image collections caused it to go into quite a long thinking period. Compared to other programs, this is as slow as molasses uphill during summer when it comes to the actual displaying of images.
Another peculiar limitation is how it cannot zoom in or out of the image, something that I consider basic at the very least. What is even worse is how it cannot rotate images. I can understand image viewers not being able to save such rotations, but they must at least be able to let you rotate the image for viewing purposes.
Albums
What the finder does with files and aliases is what ImageReel does with albums. Basically, you can get together a collection of images from various places on you hard drive and save it as an album, a very small file that only holds information about what images are in the album and where they can be located. As such, this tool is really great for creating small files that you can place anywhere and open up as photo albums.
Making one of these is dead simple and quite efficient when it comes to creating collections without spoiling you file hierarchy.
Renaming
The renaming tool included in ImageReel is surprisingly complex for a simple image viewer.
To use it you need to mark the images that you want to rename first. Marking is very straightforward, but the little marked icon at the bottom right of the screen is so very pale, you have to actively look for it to make sure it is or is not there. A strong contrast color would have been so much better, but the developer chose to go with snow on a white background.
Once the images you want are marked you can start renaming them using algorithm tags that can be mixed and combined in any way you choose, and that can read information from the image, both simple information such as date and advanced metadata such as the exposure.
The resulting filename can be previewed before you apply it, helping to avoid any mistakes or bad names.
The Good
Offers a great way to organize images into albums, by using small, alias-like files that simply point to the images in the album. Also, the renaming tool is very complex and ideal for any kind of renaming work.
The Bad
Dreadfully slow at loading images, moving from one image to another takes a few seconds while in other programs this is instant. Also it lacks the ability to do basic things such as zoom and rotate the image.
The Truth
This program would have been much better off as a file organizer and renamer. It's always strange when the additional functionality of a program is far better than the basic one? but as an image viewer, there are much better choices out there.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
