Motivation: Using the image browser saves time
Software: Paint Shop Pro 8
 
Most of the popular photo editing tools supply a built-in image browser. the pioneers for this capability has been Jasc's PaintShop Pro which was for a long time an image browser with a fair set of photo processing tools. That situation has certainly changed and PaintShop Pro 8 is the best price performance photo editor on the market right now bar none (yes that includes Photoshop CS which costs 4 times as much but is matched by and even surpassed by PhotoPaint in several editing categories).

But the critical lesson here is that image browsing is a esential and integral part of your photo editing tasks. What the image browser does is allow you to go to any directory and see all the image files on that directory. This alone saves time and effort because it makes finding that specific photo whose file name you fergot - much easier. But also as we shall see in the demo just below there are a whole set of additional photo management functions available in the image browser.

As the demo shows it is easy to just double click and edit any image in the browser. Equally easy is to change the directory and all images there will be scanned and thumbnails made up if not already available. This takes about 4-10 seconds per dozen images depending on the size of the images and the speed of your machine. But once the thumbnail catalog is setup - return to the directory and updating the catalog takes about 1/5th of the original setup time. In sum, dead simple image browsing is fast becoming a critical feature of a photo finisher's toolkit.

Jacques Surveyer is a photographer and presenter; see the latter at theOpenSourcery