By James Booth
With the inclusion of digital cameras in more and more handhelds of late, a full-function portable image application is practically mandatory. Resco has answered the call with their Photo Viewer for Palm, Pocket PC, MS Smartphone, and Symbian. This piece will specifically be addressing the Palm version because, well, my handheld runs Palm OS.
Overview
Resco Photo Viewer is a full-featured handheld photo album that supports albums, categories, external storage, slideshows, and resolutions from 160x160 to 320x480. The devices, features, formats, and third party applications that Photo Viewer supports are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that with its adjustment and cropping capabilities, Resco Photo Viewer rivals many desktop photo applications.
On the handheld, it supports JPG, BMP, and GIF images, as well as GIF animations and images from built-in Palm Cameras. See Figure A. Through its desktop counterpart, it will support TIF, PNG, and PowerPoint files.
FIGURE A
Resco Photo Viewer supports a lot of image formats for a handheld app. (click for larger image)
How the picture develops
Resco Photo Viewer is probably about the most feature-rich handheld application I've ever used. Every time I thought, "Oh, it would be nice if it did such-and-such," I'd dig a little deeper and discover that it actually does do such-and-such. In fact, even though I'd love to cover every single feature and aspect, I know in the end I'll miss some things, simply because there's so much.
The interface, like just about everything else in Resco's Photo Viewer, is completely customizable. Figure B shows just one of the many customizing options. The explorer interface allows you to find every conceivable place on your handheld or external card that a photo could hide.
FIGURE B
Photo Viewer can be customized to suit your tastes. (click for larger image)
The explorer tree can be flipped between a vertical and horizontal orientation, as in Figure C, according to your preference. Or, you can hide it completely to make more room for the photos. Speaking of photos, they can be listed by thumbnail only, thumbnail and name, or thumbnail and details (name, date, size).
FIGURE C
The explorer tree can have a vertical or horizontal orientation. (click for larger image)
Photos can be displayed full-size, auto-zoomed to fit your display, or you can zoom in on a particular detail. You can rotate the images, flip them, flop them, twist them, or turn them. Well, ok, you can't really twist them.
What you can do, though, is adjust brightness, contrast, gamma, and crop your images, in addition to rotating them, as shown in Figure D. Surprisingly, there's no color or saturation control, which I kind of expected considering everything else this program does.
FIGURE D
Photo Viewer lets you adjust photos on the handheld. (click for larger image)
Tapping and holding on an item will activate the context menu shown in Figure E, just like a right click on a PC. For images, this opens a whole new world of options, such as sending, cropping, navigation, deletion, and more. The context menu for items in the explorer lets you set default folders, create folders and categories, and delete items.
FIGURE E
Photo Viewer even sports a context menu, like a PC. (click for larger image)
Speaking of categories, in Figure F, these can be a photographer's best friends. I use them to separate all of my photos. I have a General category for images that I find interesting, but haven't taken myself. I have a category strictly for images of my daughter Elizabeth, and one for images that I've taken. You can even have categories within categories. For instance, within the My Photos category, I could have Portraits, Landscapes, and Artistic to separate the pictures I've taken even further.
FIGURE F
Categories are a real boon to the photographer. (click for larger image)
On with the show
You can slideshow your images by category, all at once, or select just the ones you want to showcase. In Figure G, you see that you can control the time frame of the display, the zoom factor, and transition effects.
FIGURE G
Even the slide show can be customized in Photo Viewer. (click for larger image)
The slideshow can wipe from one image to another with a variety of effects, such as motion, blur, dissolve, spiral, etc., or with no effect at all, just flipping from one image to the next. The images will be displayed in alphabetical order, or you can choose a random display. As far as I could determine though, you can't control the specific order of images, which would be nice.
Album generator
Resco's Photo Viewer also comes with a desktop album generator. The generator lets you compile collections of images into albums, as in Figure H. This can be very handy if, like me, you prefer to separate your images.
FIGURE H
Use Photo Viewer's desktop album generator to make your own albums. (click for larger image)
The album generator can also be used to load images that aren't contained in an album. In addition, the album generator presents you with the same image editing options as the handheld viewer, as you can see in Figure I, and gives you the option of installing to your device's main memory, or expansion card.
FIGURE I
The album generator will install to a card or main memory. (click for larger image)
Images within album files on an expansion card are only usable by the photo viewer. If the desktop album generator installs an album or an image to your handheld's main memory, it will first convert them to a PDB file (this is specific to the Palm OS). In this format you won't be able to edit them on the handheld, and they won't be usable by any other application.
But if you use the album generator to install native JPGs to your expansion card, you should be able to use them with any other application capable of interpreting them. In either case, you can still manipulate these images on your handheld.
If you have the space in your main memory and would like to install native JPGs, you can first install them to your expansion card, then use a file manager program to transfer them. In my case, I have quite a bit of space in my internal memory, so I just keep the JPGs there. That way, they're usable by other apps, and I can edit them if I need to.
Of course, I'm only speaking about the Palm OS version of the product. Because I don't have any of the other devices the photo viewer is compatible with, I was unable to test these aspects on those platforms.
Final verdict
For me, the Resco Photo Viewer was just what the doctor called for. I didn't especially care for the photo application that came with my Zodiac because it currently doesn't support albums or categories, and Resco's Photo Viewer was just what I was looking for. Not only does it provide both albums and categories, but it offers many editing and tweaking features as well. Frankly, Resco Photo Viewer is the most customizable and user-friendly Palm OS application I think I've ever encountered. If you can't customize this program to work just the way you want, then you want too much.
With it already having brightness, contrast, and gamma control, I'd like to see Resco take the next step and add color and saturation control, as well as letting you control the image order in a slideshow. Down the road, as handheld processors and memory enters the "Gig" range, and more of them incorporate video processors and 3D engines, Resco's Photo Viewer could very well become a full-fledged photo editor like Photoshop.
I rate Resco Photo Viewer at 4 out of 5. This program almost snuck by with a 5, but there were a couple of additions I'd like to see in a future version. If you're in need of a full-featured photo application for your handheld, then this program is a must-have.
I'm quite sure that I managed to miss a few of Photo Viewer's features, but there are so many aspects that I don't think it's possible to cover them all in a piece like this. I think I've given you a pretty good overview though. At the very least enough to know whether or not you would want to give it a closer look.
RATING: 4 STARS