Software Review: Software to Organize Your Images - BreezeBrowser

by Patty Hankins & Bill Lawrence

One of the challenges of either switching to digital cameras or digitizing your film images, is finding the file that you want to work on. With prints or slides, you just search through the piles until you find the image you want. When your files are on your computer, it can be a very different story. You’re likely to have a large number of files, stashed into a directory called My Photos. To make matters worse if the files come directly from a digital camera, they have names such as DSC0279.jpg or CRW_7004.crw. So how do you know which one of all those files is the one you really wanted to work on?

For us, a piece of software called BreezeBrowser, available from Breeze Systems (www.breezesys.com) helps us deal with the piles of files on our hard drives. BreezeBrowser is sold primarily as a Canon digital camera RAW file converter (more on raw files coming in a future issue). The RAW files are compressed versions of the raw sensor output from the camera, For the RAW files to be usable in editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop, they need to be converting into another format. BreezeBrowser does an excellent job of RAW file conversion. Since we installed it, we have not bothered to use Canon’s own RAW file software. So if you shoot Canon RAW files, you really need to check out BreezeBrowser.

For people who don’t shoot Canon RAW files, BreezeBrowser can still be a handy tool for your digital darkroom. The program has a file-manager interface that lets you click on a directory and display a set of thumbnail images of all the photos in the directory (including Canon RAW, jpg, tiff, png, and psd format files). Set the thumbnails to extra large, and you have a workable contact sheet on you monitor to view your photos. Double clicking on any of the thumbnails will show a larger version of the image, complete with the file EXIF data and a histogram of the red, green, blue, and overall luminosity levels. You can also view the image at 100% magnification. The file-manager interface allows you to batch copy, move, or delete files. It has a handy “tag” which lets you mark which photos are your “keepers”. It even provides for batch file renaming, so you do not have to keep those weird file names your camera assigns.

We have found this program extremely helpful for the file viewing and management functions listed above. BreezeBrowser is also notable for two other functions. First, it lets you produce professional looking contact or proof sheets on your photo printer. This function is great if you want a paper copy of your files for future reference.

Last, but certainly not least, you can use this program to create a set of web pages based upon your photos – it will even resize and do minor batch editing of the images to make them web ready. We have found this function extremely handy when you need to go directly from shooting to having a hundred or so photos up on the web in the same day. The program has a variety of templates you can use for web pages, or you can design your own templates.

Unfortunately for you Mac fans, the program is only available for Windows (98, ME, NT4, 2000, and XP). However, if you use Windows, this is an excellent program, and we consider it well worth the price of $44.95. If you need a basic program for managing your digital photo files, we would highly recommend BreezeBrowser.

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