ExifPro Image Viewer

Update

ExifPro has been recently reviewed by some on-line publications:

• Personal Computer World
• IT Reviews
• SoftSea

September 2-nd, 2007.
New release with some improvements.

April 15-th, 2007.
New release with small bug fixes is available.

March 31-th, 2007.
New tool: Date & Time adjustment for images.

February 11-th, 2007.
New release with multiple panes in a viewer window.

January 21-st, 2007.
Release version of ExifPro is now available.

October 15-th, 2006.
Update of Release Candidate with minor changes is available.

September 24-th, 2006
Release candidate version of ExifPro is now available for download.

September 4-th, 2006
All features I've been working on are completed. Now ExifPro is in a testing phase. Fair amount of code changes requires thorough testing. As soon as this task is finished with all issues resolved I will release the new build. Thank you for your patience.

June 4-th, 2006
This is a little update to let you know what is going on with the project lately. I have undertaken one task that looked deceptively simple only to turn out be a real subproject on its own.
What I'm trying to accomplish is edit file information for raw formats (CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF) as well as JPEG images. This file information is in a form of an XML (Adobe's XMP standard). It comprises of multitude of editing pieces, including keywords, descriptions, and others. It will look like this:

What does it mean in practice? Both JPEG and raw images may be tagged and described. This information metadata gets embedded inside JPEG files, or is written to a separate file that accompanies raw images (so called sidecar XMP). It is transparent to an end user; tagging/describing just works.

Of course this new file information editing is a superset of existing ExifPro's functionality. Although the point was to enable tagging of raw images, XMP format is currently employed by recent versions of Photoshop (CS/CS2/Elements), so I'm playing catch up. I wanted to be able to read this information when it's available.

XMP is flexible and capable. But that also means that it takes time to tame (from software development point of view). So, when is it ready? I've been actively working on it, but I still have a few technical obstacles to solve. I'm hoping to have this project completed during the incoming school break.

Note: There is more new features coming in the next release, but XMP is currently holding them all...

Highlights

• Speed
  ExifPro offers fast access to photographs both while scanning folders and opening them in a viewer. Caching mechanism speeds up access to already visited folders.
• Tools
  Set of tools to manipulate JPEG files: resizing, rotating, cropping, adjusting colors and levels, transferring, printing as well as generating HTML pages and stand-alone slide shows.
• Loss-less and automatic rotation
  ExifPro can rotate JPEG images without any loss in quality (no decoding & encoding). It also features an ability to rotate images automatically based on the orientation information stored by a digital camera.
• Tags
  An ability to apply tags to photographs and copy them to folders based on the tags makes it easy to collect a group of images fulfilling your criteria.
• Color correction
  Image Color Correction provides more faithful display of photographs.
• Aspect ratio correction
  Monitor Resolution option along with the CRT Aspect Correction can restore original shapes in displayed photographs.
• Canon, Nikon, Olympus raw image
  Canon raw images (CR2), Nikon's D70 and newer (NEF), Olympus E-300 (ORF) files contain big preview image. ExifPro can access CR2/NEF/ORF files directly reading embedded preview image.
• IPTC
  File information can be appended to photographs in the IPTC standard.
• GPS
  Photographs with GPS information stored inside EXIF block show longitude, latitude location.

History

In 2000 I bought my first digital camera. Dependable Sony 505V has been serving me for years. Curious about information digicam embedded in each taken photograph I wrote simple image viewer application. It's purpose was to show detailed list of EXIF information in addition to displaying photographs. This application called Exif (after the info embedded in photos: EXIF) saw the light of a day in the middle of year 2000. I announced it on the dpreview.com Sony forum and today it's used by many users from all over the world. Over the time it gained some simple capabilities that made it a bit more useful, like image resizing, rotating and copying.

Trying to improve on it took much longer than initially anticipated. After years of development efforts I finally decided to publish a sequel to original Exif application. It's fairly clear at that point, that ExifPro will never reach the status of being complete. New features, improvements, fixes and modifications change and reshape it constantly. Nevertheless I believe you will find it useful today, so instead of waiting even longer I'm releasing current version. Please give it a try and let me know about your experience with it.

Original Exif application was completely free. I wanted to stay close to this ideal. But as we know photo gear is pricey, so in order to effort it I'd like to ask for buying a registration key. It will remove this obnoxious splash screen displayed by ExifPro and will keep me motivated. I'm hoping that this decision to charge for ExifPro will not turn too many prospective users off.

Dedication

This work would have never been possible without the support of my wife. ExifPro is dedicated to her. Thank you for all your love.
Michal

Technical Information

ExifPro requires substantial amounts of memory and CPU processing power. 256 MB of RAM or more is recommended. Display mode with high- or true color is required. Screen resolution of 1024 by 768 or better is required. 1 GHz CPU or better is recommended.
All versions of 32-bit Windows are supported, although the best look is only attainable when running Windows XP or Vista. ExifPro also runs just fine in Vista 64-bit (like many other 32-bit applications).

Many users wrote to me asking for technical details regarding Exif. ExifPro is not much different than its predecessor. Written in C++ with considerable help from MFC, STL and Boost libraries. Depending on the destination OS setup will install either unicode version (Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista) or ANSI version (Windows 98/Me).