Viewing photos on the go has never been so easy. Anthony Newman tries out the latest Resco wonder-app and finds it's the perfect companion to a digital camera.
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Introduction
Digital cameras are great, aren't they? Suddenly, everyone can capture those important events without worrying about development costs or wasting film. This creates a problem, though: without prints (and let's face it, most digital photographers, this reviewer included, doesn't bother with development), how does one show off all those masterworks while away from the desktop? Resco step in with Picture Viewer, recreating the Pocket PC as a mobile photo album.
 | Picture Viewer is an invaluable assistant
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There are plenty of image viewers out there for the Pocket PC, ready to take advantage of the plush TFT screens available on modern units. Not all of them are targeted in quite the same way as Picture Viewer, however, which sports a number of features for the discerning photo-addict.
Of course, we should cover the basics first. Picture viewer can open images in any popular format (BMP, PNG, GIF, PCX, PCD, PSD, RAW, JPG, TIF, even MPG), including imported PowerPoint presentations, of pretty much any size (we tested up to 3 MP), from any location (including sub-folders on Storage Cards), and display them in portrait or landscape, resized or at any scaled resolution, in windowed or fullscreen mode. Users of course have full control over all of these factors from either the menu or a number of taskbars, which are admittedly a little obscure at times.
Navigation is facilitated by a thumbnail view, which can either fill the screen or occupy a bar on one side of the screen. From this the user can load individual photos for viewing or perform common manipulations such as exporting, sending or viewing file information in great detail, including EXIF info. Large pictures can be previewed in their entirety through a special 'Quick Preview' feature.
Once photos have been chosen, they can be arranged into slideshows either manually or via a sort by name / time / size function, after which other additions can be made: text notes, recorded voice notes, and rudimentary pictorial additions via an MS Paint-style interface. These allow labels to be added, dates and people to be recorded, and all the usual stuff that accompanies a well-used photo album of the paper variety. Photos can even be added to Favourites, like a well-thumbed page.
Of course, what use is a well-organized selection if it looks awful on-screen? To this end, Resco provide a tool to optimize the display for 12-bit screens, and also allow the gamma, brightness and contrast to be tweaked for individual photos, albums or all photos to make for the best output.
All this hard work can be saved as albums, which when tapped in Explorer automatically load as a slideshow. The albums can obviously be quite big if they contain full-size images, so the program allows shrunken images (such as 320 x 240 resolution) to be used instead. Creating an album (and indeed, opening large photos) isn't the fastest thing we've seen, but the blame for that falls on the hardware rather than Resco's software. We would like the ability to save the albums in some non-proprietary format or at least a more common one like Microsoft PowerPoint. However, this cannot really be expected.
Individual photos can also be saved at a new resolution in either JPEG or BMP, with the text notes and added drawings, although this is not designed to replace a more full-featured photo-editing package.
When viewing albums, either in fullscreen or windowed, keys can be assigned to various functions, such as rotate or advance slide, and output can be sent to a VGA-out card (all the major ones are supported) for projection. Picture Viewer offers a number of transition effects and background music in MP3 or WAV, too - this is not a simple program, although it is very easy to use.
The ease of use comes partly from its handy Start page, which allows access to the comprehensive help package, a direct link to the storage card and last album, as well as links to opening files or albums from the handheld.
Conclusion
Resco Picture Viewer is a triumph: it offers the digital photographer a very competent viewer, and an excellent album creator, complete with tools for organizing, annotating, managing and editing both the images themselves and a finished presentation. Our gripes are only tiny: Storage cards are always referred to as 'CF Card', and slideshows can only be ended by a double-tap on the screen, which puzzled us for a while. Ultimately, Resco Picture Viewer comes very highly recommended.
- What's positive: A complete tool for managing digital photos on the go
- What's negative: Icons a little obscure at times; another export format would have been nice
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Availability
Resco Picture Viewer 4.11 is available now for $19.95 USD, and is compatible with both Pocket PC 2002 and 2003 devices.
Price and availability
The will start selling for TBA () in November 1999.
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