How to add your favorite image to a folder

SnapAct: stylish image viewer with free online synchronization

Snapact is a free, stylish image viewing and management software that offers a good range of image manipulation and management functions, including tag and metadata editing, a drop basket, and the creation of virtual albums which can be uploaded and shared using the free online Snapact photo sharing service.What’s different about Snapact is that while these programs previously sited tend on average to be resource hungry or have high 3D requirements, Snapact does not (uses around 23 megs in memory when running). On the other hand what Snapact manages to do is to retain a pleasing “coolness factor” while offering a lot of nice features both for image manipulation and image management (but especially the latter).

What also needs to be said about Snapact is that it is very much a desktop front-end to the free Snapact image sharing service; which is to say that it is designed for seamless integration with your online Snapact account. Having said that, I also have to note that you can use this program as a local viewer and image management program without signing up or using the online component. I had been using this program as a local image viewer for a week, in fact, before I decided to review it and only then did I sign up for a Snapact online account for the purposes of writing about it.

features:

• Carousel-style browsing: similar to the famous iTunes carousel, this is not only fashionable these days but rather cool, and the implementation here is a very good one (fast, efficient). When viewing an image all of the other images in the same folder are displayed as thumbnails in the bottom part of the screen and will enlarge in turn as you mouse over them. Or you can simply use the left/right arrow keys to browse back and forth, as you would with any image viewer.
• Image editing functions: rotate, crop, blur, sharpen, brighten/contrast, redeye, adjust tint/color, and negative and black and white image filters.
• Image managent functions: edit or add tags to your images, edit other metadata (including rating, title, description, etc), view metadata (simply hover over any image thumbnail), add to album (an album is a kind of virtual folder or category), synchronize album(s) to your Snapact online account (this is optional), add to mini-basket (a handy work area where you can drag images or other files you would like to work with).
  
• Smart browsing: the “predefined” album in your list of albums offers browsing by smartlist (recently modified, image size, etc).
• The search box: a fast way to find what you’re looking for. Will look at file and folder names as well as metadata (tags, description, EXIF data, etc).
• Snapact online: once you create a free Snapact account you or any of your friends can log into your page which will have a URL that looks like (www.snapact.com/u/your-username). As far as image sharing sites go Snapact online actually offers a very pleasant user experience. You can surf “recent images”, “recent album”, by tag, etc. and the site offers thumbnail-style views and a page for each uploaded image offering photo and EXIF information. Images uploaded are reduced in terms of their file size and I am unsure as to whether or not there is a storage limit per account (please advise if you have more information).
• Snapact online privacy settings: you can change your privacy settings such that your images are accessible to just you, to just your official Snapact “friends”, or publicly to everyone.
• Panoramic images: I used Snapact to view a folder of panoramic images with some good results (click on the “Full Size” button first, then use the mouse to scroll across your panorama).

Wish list (or how this program can be even better):

• Mouse-wheel control: for browsing images. Currently the mousewheel is not utilized, which I find a tad surprising.
• Notification when unpublishing an album: stating that this will result in x number of uploaded images being removed from the online account on next sync. Is a good idea.
• Slideshow function: this is conspicuously absent, and while I never cared much for my images being automatically displayed in succession I do think that many users will want and miss this.

The verdict: I will confess that at first I did not intend to review this software, but the main draw for me was the good user experience that it provides. If you are looking for a stylish image viewer with good features that does not hog your system you should check out Snapact; also, if you want a quick and very functional online image synching/sharing service certainly give Snapact online a try (if not, don’t sweat it, you can use Snapact 100% locally without using the online image sharing function).

Compatibility: Windows XP or Vista.

download: SnapAct

Free Video Capture Software Download - Debut Video Capture

Debut Video Capture is a free video recording software that can capture video and audio from any USB device, and can also record anything that is displayed on-screen such as a video that is playing or a user’s visible on-screen activity. Supports a wide variety of output formats and encoders.

I was recently faced with the need to make videos of a user (me) interacting with a site that we’ve created at work. This presented me with the opportunity to do some research and find a good screen-recording program; the last time I’d posted something like this was the Krut Computer Recorder way back in April 2007, but since then there seems to have been a proliferation of good free options. I decided to post this program because it is simple and straightforward, extremely easy to use, and offers a good number of output encoders and formats.

Features:

# Input sources: you can record any input coming from a USB video input device (including a videocam with USB input). You can also record your visible screen or a sub-section of the screen.
# (Another) Debut ScreenshotDefining an area of the screen to record: is extremely easy; click on the "select a desktop rectangle tool" and draw a rectangle anywhere on screen. Debut will only record that area and any visible events that take place within it. Alternately you can click the "capture the whole desktop" button to record the entire screen.
# Output: can output in a variety of formats, including AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, 3PG, MP4, MOV, and FLV). You can use a number of encoders which the program - I believe - installs (including DV video), as well as any encoders that you might have installed on your system (e.g. I installed an Xvid encoder and was easily able to use it to encode video screen captures with Debut).
# Editing output: you can resize the output video on the fly while recording and/or change the framerate to something that you set manually.
# Video effects: you can apply a number of filters on-the-fly (black and white, negative, sepia), and also have the option to change output color settings (brightness, contrast, gamma).
# Text annotation: also supported is adding an on-screen text message that is present across the entire video. You can choose it’s on screen placement, alignment, whether or not to use a background color, font, font-style, and font size, etc. The program also allows for variable date and/or time stamping.
# Hotkeys: you can define hotkeys for most program functions. This is useful when you do not want the program dialog to be visible on screen, and therefore can minimize it and control Debut using the keyboard.
# Other options: include pre-determining the recording time, sending a recorded video on completion as an email attachment, uploading to an FTP server, recording to multiple drives (including network drives), and running an external program, command based or otherwise, after recording to process the resulting file.
# Audio setup: the first time the program runs it will present an "audio setup wizard". There are two sources of audio: internal audio and an audio input device such as a microphone. If you are not interested in the latter you can dismiss this dialog and probably not need it again (if you need to re-run it later you can).

Download: Debut Video Capture

Image viewer with a high coolness factor: Pictomio

Pictomio is a free image viewer which features a slick, modern interface and 3D accelerated browsing of image libraries. It brings together a host of functions for working with images such automatic grouping of images, tagging, image rating, EXIF and metadata editing, as well as image rotation and zooming. Pictomio can also view and manage video and media files and requires a fairly powerful graphics card to run.

In software as in anything, we ideally want to balance both form and function. And although Pictomio scores high marks on both, there exists a good number of more powerful and feature-rich freeware image viewers out there that nonetheless will not hold a candle to this one in terms of sheer coolness and the richness of the user experience. It does come at a cost (will require a powerful graphics card, and is somewhat higher on resource consumption than the average viewer) but if your machine has the resources you will probably love this. Here are more notes on this program:

• The user interface: simply looks good and is definitely the program’s strong suite. Navigation is intuitive and everything is accessible through a combination of tabs (on top, on the side of the screen, etc) and right-click context menus.
• Image browsing: offers thumbnail browsing, film-strip browsing, single image browsing and the iTunes-style carousel browsing, which is somewhat cool but not exactly mind-blowing (and which is presumably why the 3D acceleration is needed). Allows you to sort and/or filter images based on different criteria (see “organization” below).
• Organization: if you are looking for a tool that can best organize a complicated image library this one is on steroids. Pictomio scans a user selected folder initially and immediately sets to work indexing your library and organizing it across different categories and elements. For example, it allows you to classify images into user-defined categories, rate them, flag them as favorites, tag them using multiple arbitrary tags, create albums, browse by medium or by “color mark”, browse by EXIF data, and maintain a shortlist (a basket, if you will) of images to work with. It even keeps a history of performed search queries. You can filter what you are looking at by everything (e.g. date criteria, landscape or portrait, etc.)
• Slideshows: you can use the slideshow function just as you would any other image viewer (grab a bunch of images and run the slideshow), or you can choose to specify exactly the display duration for each image, the type of transition used (supports nine different transitions such as Cut, Dissolve, Flip, CrossFade, fade) and the duration of each transition. If you create the perfect slideshow you can save and re-use or re-view it later on.
• Metadata: offers a comprehensive metadata editor. Aside from some of the elements mentioned above (rating, category, tags, albums) it allows you to enter annotations and to edit/view EXIF data.
• Editing: this program is not geared towards editing. There is little on offer aside from the lossless rotation and zooming functions; no cropping, no applying of filters, color (or redeye) correction, no on-image text annotation, etc. It assumes that you already have all of these functions using an external image editor.
• Keyboard shortcuts: for the keyboard-inclined, Pictomio supports a keyboard shortcut for most everything you can do with it.
• Memory use: this seems to vary wildly depending on what I’m doing with the program. I’ve seen it go from as little as 3 megs when minimized to as high as 120 megs. Suffice it to say it is somewhat resource hungry.
• Other functions: a color dropper and a ruler to measure image elements. Nice touches.
• Other media support: in theory Pictomio supports video and audio files as well as well as images. However, this seems like an afterthought, as the program is so heavily geared towards images. It seems to be dependent on system codecs, which I try to limit as much as possible, and was not able to play many of my videos.
• A pared-down version with lower 3D graphics card requirements: i.e. a version that takes away the carousel view and some of the bells and whistles but maintains the look-and-feel and everything else. Would be great
• The option to switch off non-image media support (videos and music files) in the settings. Or otherwise remove it as a feature altogether if that might make the program less resource hungry.

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista, with 1 GB RAM and CPU > 1GHz. Requires a graphics card with Shader Model 2.0 and a minimum of 128 MB video RAM.

Download: Pictomio

Free Easy CD DVD Burner

Free Easy Burner is a CD/DVD burning and authoring program that supports burning data and audio CD’s and DVD’s, copying CD’s and DVD’s (by ripping and burning ISO’s), and Ripping audio CD’s into MP3’s.

If you want a small CD/DVD burning program that performs all standard functions without many frills, then Free Easy Burner will cater for all of your burning needs (pun intended heheh).

since first reviewing this program on 2/3/2007 it has become adware, despite still being billed as freeware on the author’s site. This means that as of version 1.2.43 the program, while fully functional, nonetheless displays ads (albeit harmless ones) within its interface. However you can still download version 1.2.21 of this program, which is fully functional and ad-free, from the link at the bottom of this page.

• Supports dual-layer DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW.
• Burns Data CD’s and DVD’s: allows dragging and dropping of files and folders, will verify and/or finalize your CD/DVD.
• Will copy CD’s and (unencrypted) DVD’s by ripping an ISO image on hard drive and burning it back.
• Will write to ISO (i.e. can create ISOs from any collection of files and/or folder). Will also burn ISO files.
• Burns Audio CD’s; will convert your audio files into a playable audio CD. Supported audio file formats are: WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A.
• Rips audio CD’s to MP3 or WAV file formats. Supports automatic FreeCDDB tag information retrieval.

This is great, straightforward freeware that does the job very well and looks good to boot. Nice simply functional user interface; I recommend higly.

Compatibility: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

Download: Easy CD DVD Burner