Product Reviews

We all know that organising your media files is a really sensible thing to do. Making sure all your photos and movies are available and where you expect them to be will save you time and effort: that's a given. The trouble is that organising all your files is at best boring and at worst mind-numbingly tedious. You can use iPhoto to manage most of your stuff, but it becomes slow when there's a large database of content and as it's designed primarily for photos, editing and tagging options are limited. QPict 7 from RuneLindman Development could well be the answer.

This nifty application quickly gives you an overview of all your media files and provides a number of options for managing them. At its most basic, QPict organises all your media files and lets you quickly search and sort them. There's also a batch process option that enables you to edit a host of elements all in one go.

There are three versions of QPict, starting with the standard version that costs $35. A Professional option and an Enterprise licence are available for $99 and $1495 respectively. Impressively, though, the only difference between the low-end version and the range-topping one is the number of users and level of support. In all other respects, the application retains the same options and performance regardless of your initial outlay.

The QPict 7 interface is simple yet very usable, with a three-pane layout. One column identifies the source of your files and this can be as specific as an individual folder or as broad as your entire hard drive. Then there's

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the organiser, which as its name suggests, allows you to sort the various files in a number of ways. The third window is the preview section, where you can see the thumbnail representations of your media files. You can view images as thumbnails alone, as a list with all the relevant data displayed in columns, or a mixture of the two. One of the strongest features of QPict is its ability to edit the display preferences to suit your needs. If the name of the file isn't that important to you, but the date and time of exposure are, you can choose to display only the latter information with each image. The range of information display options available is impressive.

Viewing options aren't limited to just the simple window viewer, though. You can set QPict to display files in a full-screen mode that allows you to see more images at once. You can also put the application into a Kiosk mode so no one can quit it or edit images without a password. As such, you could use QPict as a rolling slide show for display purposes.

In use, QPict is a little like a cross between iTunes and iPhoto with a few extra options thrown in for good measure. The speed at which QPict indexes all your images is impressive, with a folder of nearly 3000 files of various types ready to be played with in less than a minute. Of course, QPict isn't moving anything so you'd expect it to be quick; still, the speed with which it's ready to start is impressive. We found that when scrolling through image thumbnails, QPict could be a little sluggish at displaying the previews, but it's not so bad that you have wait more that a moment for it to catch up.

There are a number of different media cataloguing tools on the market so QPict had to work pretty hard to impress us. We're happy to say that the overall speed, efficiency and feature set of the program more than met our expectations, particularly given the price point. The batch process tool is extremely flexible and the full-screen mode makes it easy to sort through images quickly. We'd have liked the preview to be a bit snappier when scrolling, but, overall, QPict7 is an efficient and useful tool.