Pickshow With Tunes - Introduction

Download picShow With Tunes 1.0

INTRODUCTION

As we release our newest application I would like to share with you some of the background information behind the creation of the picShow With Tunes 1.0. You see I am one of those people that when we travel we take tons of photos and when we come back home we want to re-live the recent adventure. When friends visit us we want to share with them the most recent events that they missed (junior's goal at the end of the 1st half, last Sunday). And what could be better then doing it with the pictures scrolling in the background. So I started to look a tool that would fit the bill. I remembered that when my friend gave me a CD with his pictures, a couple years back, my first question was "How am I going to view them?". This was when the operating system was Windows 95 and it had nothing that would allow you to even view the pictures. But I thought "This is 2011, we came a long way...". Yes we did and there is plenty of tools/applications that would let us view our pictures. Some of them are build into the operating system, some come with our cameras and some we can download and use for free. Yet, every time we watched the photos scrolling on my laptop screen I couldn't help myself but think "I wish there was music playing in the background.", "I wish that picture was rotated, so we wouldn't have to twist our necks to see it better.", "I wish I could pause this one, I have a story that goes with it.". Finally I gave up the search for that "perfect instant slide show" and decided to write one myself. So you see the picShow With Tunes was created to make me happy, and it did. But when it was finished we looked at it and decided to take an extra step (it actually was a mile) and make into a commercial product for everybody. So without further ado here it is your instant slide show app picShow With Tunes 1.0. Once you setup your options it takes two clicks (yes we counted) to start your slide show of your most recent photos from your camera. It will automatically rotate portrait pictures and play your favorite music (mp3 - one or the more, or a Windows Media Player play list). Pause it briefly with just move of the mouse or indefinitely if you take the mouse over the control bar.

For the full list of the features see the next post or go to the web page picShow With Tunes 1.0. Creating this little gadget was the most fun many of us had in a long time and we hope that you will enjoy using it as much as we did creating it. 

Happy viewing from all of us at Custom DataWorks Inc.

To download a free 30 day trial go to picShow With Tunes at Custom DataWorks webpage.

picShow With Tunes 1.0 in action by BurnWorld.com on YouTube. (If you can please watch this video in full screen HD mode)

Photo Management Philosophy.

This is a post from the Custom DataWorks blog dedicated to one of their applications picManager 3.0.

Our approach.
First let me share with you the philosophy behind creation of the picManager. 
We as people have a tendency to accumulate things. We are not hoarders by a long shot but because we are busy and time is the one commodity that we do not have a lot of, our 'stuff' gets disorganized. With today's abundance of digital photography that includes our treasured memories that we want to preserve but we do not have the time to catalog. Sometimes it gets so bad that we had to create a new profession "Professional Organizer". With that in mind we set our goals for the picManager to be not another photo catalog/editor/publisher/... . Instead we wanted this new application to be as simple as possible and to do one job but do it well. The job is: Get my photos in one copy, in one place, sorted and filed by year and month (we had to make some choices and the year/month combination appealed to us and everybody that we talked to could relate to this idea). For us the perfect repository should be intuitive and let us find any photo with minimal effort. The second goal was to help users stay organized. To do that we made the application to remember user preferences and every time the user has some fresh photos on the flash card (or any other media) it takes under a minute to start the synchronization and when it is done all your pictures are in their right folder.

Destination Folder's Structure.
Because picManager had been designed as an organizational tool, the destination folder structure where all you pictures will be stored had to be easy to accept for everybody and intuitive enough to finding any picture even years from now.

The screen shot on the left represents a folder structure that we chose for the photo repository. User selects only the top most folder (in the screen shot this is 'All My PHOTOS' folder) and the picManager generates the YYYY year and MM month folders as needed. We know that some of the photos will have the date and/or time wrong (somebody forgot to set the correct date on the camera, I took some pictures in Europe and the time zone throws the date off etc.) but for the most part all your pictures should have the correct date and time embedded inside the picture metadata and picManager is using it to create all those folder.

Picture Orientation

The second issue that we wanted to address with picManager is the picture orientation. Most of the people we spoke to agree that rotating each picture taken with your camera turned sideways is annoying and time consuming, this problem alone can stop you from trying to organize your photos. Vast majority of the cameras today can record its orientation during the shot and they store this information in a picture metadata. Our picManager can use this information to automatically rotate the picture to its proper position during the copy operation. 

In the screen shot to the left you can see an example of the original picture in the horizontal position.The photo on the left is the copy that had been automatically rotated and saved to the hard drive. During the review process (this is entirely optional) users have an ability to reverse the rotation to its original position if they chose to. I should also add that the detecting the picture orientation can be turned off if users prefer to see the photos in their original original orientation.

What it should be used for
The last point that I would like to make is the intended use for picManager. Its main goal is to get your pictures of the camera media and onto you computer drive and/or back up media. It is not intended as photo editor or even presentation software. I will give you an example of how I find it most helpful. Last summer we went to Italy and at the end of the day between seven of us we had three cameras with a couple of hundred of pictures. It took me total of five minutes to check on the copy process but by the time we were ready for dinner all the photos were on my laptop sorted and rotated ready to be played as a slide show.

If you are still not convinced please download the FREE TRIAL and you have 30 days to test it.
If you have any comments or questions please contact me via email or leave a comment here.