I recently bought a Kodak DC260 to start a digital imaging company for insurance and real estate. I plan to be buying a laptop soon. I would like to know if there is any software program out there that allows you to save,organize, and access digital pictures with out the frills of a photo shop.

I am currently practicing with Microsoft PictureIt, but find organizing and saving photos to be time consuming. What other programs are out there that would allow me to access a number of photos in thumbprint form? Kodak picture easy software is no good.

-- Mark Zuchlewski (zuchlewski@yahoo.com), February 24, 1999

Answers

You might look at Ixla Explorer. Haven't had much experience with it, but it will take the pictures directly from the camera and present them in thumbnail format and allow you to organize them in different folders. I think they have a trial demo at their website for download, believe they are at www.ixla.com. Hope this helps.

-- Bob (bocot@ibm.net), February 26, 1999.

I have tried a number of relatively inexpensive packages (e.g. $30- 40) and currently like a very easy to use and efficient one called "Firehand Ember Pro". You can take a look at it and download a trial version at www.firehand.com. There are other more comprehensive packages (e.g Thumbs Plus} but I find that I don't need all the features and the package is about $80. Hope this helps.

-- Fred Rothenberg (fredila@aol.com), February 27, 1999.

We use CompuPic around here a lot, from Photodex Corporation (www.photodex.com). We're using an older version, but the newer ones support things like keywords and searching on them. We usually organize things on disk by camera type/image type/date, etc, so really just having a very fast thumbnail viewer is super-helpful, and CompuPic does this very well. It's fast and very easy to use, and I believe it's pretty cheap. (Don't recall current price, but think it's under $50.) We routinely deal with literally thousands of images, and find CompuPic, combined with our folder organization, works very well.

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), March 05, 1999.