CocoViewX - A simple image management tool

Dec 29, '04 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: robg

CocoViewX icon The macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]

Do you review lots of digital images, either from your camera or another source? Sure, you could use iPhoto, but that's a large app that takes a while to load and can be a bit unwieldy to work with. Thanks to a recent Macworld Mac Gems column by Dan Frakes, I've added another review tool to my toolkit. CocoViewX is a fast, easy to use tool with tons of features. For me, it makes short work of flipping through tons of images (many of which are sent by friends and relatives) and deciding whether or not I want to keep them.

Among the features you'll find in CocoViewX are a file exporter with image type and size conversions, quick export that lets you export the next image with the same settings as the last (for making quick thumbnails for a website, for instance), file management options (move, copy, rename, delete, etc.), and a wonderful keyboard-driven slideshow program (space to start the show, l and r to rotate an image, and any number of ways to move from one image to the next). There's also a "dropbox," which is actually a drawer where you can save often-viewed images, and menu options for setting an image as your desktop picture, mailing an image, or opening an image in Preview.

I typically use CocoViewX by dropping a folder of images onto its icon, and then just reviewing them in its default browser window. When I see an image I don't want, I hit Command-Delete and it's moved into the trash. In this way, I can work through a large number of images in a hurry.

I didn't give CocoViewX a 10 for a couple reasons. First, it's quit unexpectedly on me once or twice, which is a bit disconcerting. Second, if you're using the browser view and you rotate an image a number of times, it becomes temporarily blurry -- this goes away when you click off the image and back on it, but it's still a bit annoying. And finally, I'd love to be able to "mark for deletion" while using the full-screen slideshow mode in addition to the browse mode. But for a freeware app, CocoViewX is very feature-laden and makes a lot of image management tasks much easier...

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041229061532734