Blazing fast image viewing with Photon 1.0.2

Photon just loaded 839 JPEG image previews for me in under 2 seconds. That's expletive worthy speed. And when it loads the full image, it's just as fast, even with RAW format images. And it loads every pixel of a RAW image. If you set the preview mode to fit-to-screen, clicking the image gives you a loupe-style zoom to full resolution. It reads photos–from folders or directly from cameras/memory cards–with a feature they call "Instant Import". I plugged in a camera and by the time I had looked back at the screen, it had recorded all of the images on the card.

Photon serves one purpose, but serves it well. It helps you do a rough cut of large batches of images before heading into Lightroom or Aperture for more advanced procedures. It lacks any form of image flagging, has limited viewing of metadata fields (the columns in the HUD aren't individually expandable or adjustable) and no search feature of any kind. It basically provides a very fast, very streamlined interface for creating collections ("stacks") of images and–once you've bought the full version–exporting them with options to convert the format to jpg, png, psd and more. It does provide histograms, which is handy for deciding on which RAW images you're planning to keep.

A demo of Photon is available for download, and costs $49 to purchase. That's shown as a markdown from $69, but I'm unsure if that's a limited-time offer.

View Tags

Source: http://www.photon-app.com/

Categories

Multimedia Software

Photon just loaded 839 JPEG image previews for me in under 2 seconds. That's expletive worthy speed. And when it loads the full image, it's...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

14 Comments

Filter by:

jason

can photon print "contact sheets"?
(ie. a specified number of image thumbnails on a single page)

January 04 2008 at 2:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ben

+1 for full screen viewing

January 04 2008 at 3:18 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex

OOH! It's teh spam!

(Reported)

January 03 2008 at 6:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mike Bernardo

Hi all,

I'm the developer of Photon. Great to see interest in my little app!

$49 is the introductory price.

Photon 1.0 is purposefully very minimalist. I wanted to get the app out there as early as possible and gather feedback on what people wanted, rather than take guesses as to what people *might* want.

Brett is right that 1.0 is focused on sorting and culling a large batch of images. However, 1.0 is just the beginning. I've already got a long list of features queued up for the next version. If you have ideas for things you'd like to see added, I'd love to hear them.

Also, if you're seeing a crash and would like to help out, it would be great to get a crash report.

Thanks!

January 03 2008 at 6:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Mike Bernardo's comment

shoepal

"right click - open with" would be handy. I just opened a couple thousand images I haven't looked at for years and I found one I wanted to take in to photoshop and print. Anyhow, it is amazingly fast, which definitely makes sorting through thousands of photos more enjoyable.

January 03 2008 at 7:44 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gus Jenkins

I would like to see in the demo download, instead of exporting stacks disabled, perhaps a watermark or something like that, so I can see the speed in which the stacks get exported.

If I have to wait an hour for a couple of hundred pics to go from RAW to JPG, it would not be worth the price to me

January 04 2008 at 8:21 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

If it had full screen viewing I'd be all over it.

January 03 2008 at 5:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kelly

VERY FAST, too bad CS3 Bridge can't work like this.

January 03 2008 at 4:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Shun Chu

Too bad it crashes on loading any of Fuji S5 Pro's RAW files... I'd have loved to use it to get rid of images I won't ever use before loading them into Aperture or Lightroom... :(

January 03 2008 at 4:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

builtformac

I'm hoping Adobe looks at this program and gets this technology of imagethumb processing in Bridge. Thanks for the tip this app will certainly help me browsing tons of images. Dave, this app can also convert and handle RAW well.

January 03 2008 at 3:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dave

$49 dollars for an image browser? I mean, it browses images, and what else?

Agreed, it's quite fast but to me $20 or $25 perhaps would be more a reasonable price.

January 03 2008 at 3:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

3 replies to Dave's comment

Buy an ad here