Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer Pick of the Week
Splash Photo imageThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]
This is a somewhat non-standard Pick of the Week, but I felt this program was worth a mention. We were out and about the other evening (dialing for dollars at our local PBS television station) and someone asked if I had any pictures of our daughter ... I pulled out the one I carry in my wallet, and they then noticed my Palm Pilot (which I had brought to call up relatives and friends for donations!) and said "Geez, why don't you have a bunch of pictures on there?" For whatever reason, I'd never even thought about doing that ... so when I got home, I set out on a mission to find a good photo viewer and management app for my Tungsten.

A quick visit to the various Palm software sites found tons and tons of viewers, but very few with Mac front-end clients. After some more digging, I found SplashPhoto, and I've been quite happy with how it works. After installing the program on your Palm and your Mac, you launch a Mac-based (10.2 or newer) program (SplashPhoto Desktop) to manage the images on the device. SplashPhoto Desktop looks and works like any well-written Mac application, and it includes drag-and-drop support -- I just dragged images from iPhoto to SplashPhoto. The application's default view is a thumbnail image browser, as seen here:


You can also view your images in list, detail (photo plus category info), or gallery (small images, no name below them) modes, and the info provided in list view mode can be customized.

As photos are brought into the program, you are given the opportunity to adjust zoom (which area of the larger image you'd like to show on the Palm), brightness, and contrast. SplashPhoto then trims and reduces the image size for you automatically -- I was dragging in three megapixel images, and they'd wind up as roughly 35Kb 320x320 JPEGs on the Palm. You can also leave the images their full size and then use a zoom function to scroll around the full-size image on your Palm ... while this sounds quite cool, after about the second time I tried it, I decided I preferred the smaller images taking up the whole screen (not to mention the RAM hit!).

After loading up the desktop application, just hit the Hot Sync button, and the images are transferred to the Palm. The Palm application features the same interface, allowing the same image browser modes, and it also features a slide show -- just tap a picture to start, and then use the navigation keys to go to the next or previous picture. You can even beam an image to another compatible Palm (or potentially a phone, though I can't test that). You can even add security to your images, allowing you to mark some as "Private," and these will require a password before they can be viewed.

Images can be deleted from either the desktop or the Palm; the next time you hot sync, the data is synched such that both programs display the same images. About my only complaint is that you can't automatically rename imported images -- I have my camera set to re-use image names, so I occasionally have duplicate images that I need to manually rename before bringing them into SplashPhoto.

At $29.95, SplashPhoto isn't cheap, but most of the viewers I found ranged between $19.95 and $39.95, so it's in the ballpark. And it also comes with a fully functional 30-day trial so you can try before you buy. Now, whenever I need a little bit of Kylie's smile during the day, she's but a quick button-and-tap away! This may be the application that finally drives me to buy a memory card for my Palm :).
    •    
  • Currently 1.63 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
[20,578 views]  

SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer | 6 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer
Authored by: bromhead on Dec 09, '03 05:41:21AM

I use an older Palm m515 with a low res screen (160x160). When I first used Splash Photo, I made the image exactly the same size as the screen, and it didn't look very good at all. It might have been the image scaling. (My photos were medium/high res to start with.)

The hint: Change the default resolution to 320x320 in the preferences, and the images look heaps better.



[ Reply to This | # ]
SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer
Authored by: bromhead on Dec 09, '03 05:43:51AM

Perhaps the hint should have said "Try making the default screen resolution higher than your Palm resolution"...



[ Reply to This | # ]
SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer
Authored by: mm2270 on Dec 09, '03 10:27:32AM

I'm not sure I agree with this hint for SplashPhoto. I've been using this product for several years now. If you up the rez on the photos you import, you're creating a lot of overhead image data that a 160x160 resolution screen cannot properly display. As it is, on my Clie with a 320x320 screen, images at that resolution display very slowly, so I imagine it would be the same with a Palm M50x model.
This is akin to creating a 200 PPI image to display on a website. Wasted resolution.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it does look better regardless, but just keep in mind that the images files it creates will take up more space on your Palm's RAM or SD card, and may be a bit slower to render on the Palm.



[ Reply to This | # ]
SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer
Authored by: lanej0 on Dec 09, '03 11:03:17AM

As an aside, SplashPhoto works beautifully with MissingSync so that you can export photos directly from iPhoto to your Palm. It's great.



[ Reply to This | # ]
SplashPhoto - A reallly nice Palm/Mac image viewer
Authored by: amacaulay on Dec 09, '03 05:21:55PM

If you have Sony's Clie then Missing Sync is enough: You can view pictures exported from iPhoto in the app that comes with the Clie.



[ Reply to This | # ]
SplashPhoto - About price
Authored by: iamos on Dec 09, '03 11:50:21AM

You can also get this app (which I don't use) as part of the Splash Wallet, a four-program bundle that costs $49.95. I use SplashID all the time--love it--and SpashMoney and SplashShopper occasionally.



[ Reply to This | # ]