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»PhotoFolio is program to catalog pictures, a purpose for which there are already several programs available for the Amiga. For this test, I have used the Version 2.0. PhotoFolio is a product of Steeple Software in Australia, the programmers are Steve Quartly und Paul Huxham.
PhotoFolio is delivered on CD-ROM and requires an Amiga with OS 3.0 and a 68020 processor or better.
The complete installation (with all libraries and data files) is done by an installer script.
Here you have the choice from several languages (English, Italiano, Deutsch, Espaņol and Czech) in which you want the installation to appear. For all these languages, there is also a locale-catalog present, that means you can use the program itself in this language, too.
Before you run the program the first time, you should set the preferences for the ImageIOLibrary and for OpenURL.
In the prefs for ImageIOLibrary you may choose whether the program decodes pictures with the jpeg.library or with a datatype, which may be preferable if you have a PPC-board and PPC-datatypes. In the OpenURL prefs you can set the paths of your browsers.
At the first start of the program you are requested to register yourself. The serial number can be found on the inside of the CD cover.
A complete MUI installation is required. The CD contains a suitable demo version.
So what is special about PhotoFolio? It offers to catalog pictures for users (255), groups (4) and categories (22). The thumbnail size is fully customizable. You can have any size between 20x20 and 200x200 pixels, whereas you can choose the number of pixels on the x- and y-axis separately. It offers to display only thumbnails selected by boolean operators, e.g. only pictures with a 5 in the middle of the name. It can adjust the gamma curve to make the thumbnails better identifiable. The thumbnails can be sorted by name, by size and by type (JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc.). You can copy, save and delete pictures and thumbnails, although I did not manage to delete a single thumbnail without having the picture deleted, too.
PhotoFolio has three different modes for scaling the thumbnails. "Normal (fast)", "High quality (slow)" and "Best quality (slowest)". Furthermore you can set the JPEG compression rate for the thumbnails between 20 and 100%. The default is 85 percent.
Then you can choose after how many created thumbnails the window should be updated. You can freely choose a value between one and threehundred.
To display the full pictures you have three options. Either you use the internal picture viewer, which can display the pictures progressively, this means the pictures are displayed while loading. Unfortunately it is quite slow. The nest possibility is to use the (included) Mysticview, which is also configureable from within PhotoFolio. Mysticview is very fast, but if you choose the 1:1-pixel-mode, the pictures can appear distorted. If you don't like this option either, you can use you own favorite picture viewer.
As you can see in the picture above, it is possible to open as many window as you want. Their number is only limited by the available memory.
According to the documentation, you can "Drag'n'Drop" between preview windows and list-trees. I don't know if it was program bug or a problem with my configuration (A4000/060/PPC), but I wasn't able to "drag" one single picture, not to mention "dropping". Unfortunately I wasn't able to test it on another computer, because both of my A1200's are broken and my A1000 doesn't have a HD, a CD-ROM, or even a 68020 processor and Kick 3.0. Maybe it works for one of you. Maybe you could tell me if it worked out.
It is possible to create the thumbnails linked or not linked. In the linked variant, the thumbnails are created in the "Temporary Path" or any other user-definable path. The only problem is that you have to have access to this path to display the thumbnails or they will be re-calculated every time, which can take a lot of time. On the other hand, the linked variant seems to contain a bug. In this variant, the thumbnails are saved in the same directory as the original pictures but with another name (the thumbnail for picture.jpg is called picture.jpg<>). If you chose this variant and saved the thumbnails, the next time you open this directory, PhotoFolio will start to show icons if they are present, even if it is set not to show them.
From the program description you can see that PhotoFolio directly supports the digitzer card VLab (NOT VLabMotion) and that pictures from the VLab can be displayed directly in Photofolio. But because my VLab isn't in my computer at the moment, I was unable to test this feature.
PhotoFolio uses the the MUI BubbleHelp extensively and is because of this very intuitive to use. The "Help" key brings you to the AmigaGuide, so you are nowhere in the program without help, which should be rated very positive.
Result:
PhotoFolio is a good program to quickly organize the pictures on your harddisk, is easy to use, but it has a few minor deficiencies, which could be straightened out. It would be good if the author would adapt the program better for the PPC to gain speed; adding a few simple image manipulation features would be a good idea, too. You can be in two minds about the usage of MUI. It clearly gives the program a StyleGuide-conform interface, on the other hand, it slows the program down, because MUI uses quite a few system resources. On slow system this can lead to problem, because the JPEG thumbnails require a lot of processing power. The program is pretty good for Version 2 and doesn't need to hide from its competitors (except for a few features.)
Rating: 7 of 10 points
Source in Germany:
Stefan Ossowskis Schatztruhe
Gesellschaft fuer Software mbH
Veronikastr. 33
45131 Essen
or
Michael Scholz <mgf-design@gmx.net> http://www.mgf-design.de«
