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Photo Management

Overview

Both OS X and Windows XP have automatic processes to generate a web gallery from your photos. Both rely on the file system to navigate and manage images, particularly by storing all of your images in your ~/Pictures (OS X) and My Pictures (Windows XP) folders.

Mac OS X

Apple's iPhoto ships with all new Macs as part of their iLife suite of digital media applications; iLife, however, is not part of the actual operating system.

Image Capture has a handful of automatic tasks you can choose from: "Preview," "Build Slideshow," "Build Web Page," and various cropping and fitting options.

Choose from post-processing tasks such as building a webpage and cropping

The items in the Automatic Task menu are in fact scripts located in /System/Library/Image Capture/Automatic Tasks/. "Build Slide Show" and "Build Web Page" can be run independently of Image Capture, so, for instance, you can build a web page from your photos just by dropping a folder onto the Build Web Page application. Conversely, you can modify the contents of the Automatic Task menu by placing any application (like Photoshop action droplets) or script in this folder, making Image Capture extensible. You can also use Automator to create image workflows that can then be saved as plugins to use in Image Capture.

Preview comes with a handful of image correction tools: rotate, flip, crop, white point, black point, gamma, saturation, contrast, brightness, sharpness and sepia.

Core Image Fun House (part of the Developers Tools that come bundled with OS X) allows you to apply any Core Image effect/filter (Apple calls them Image Units) to an image and save it as a JPEG.

Windows XP

Folders in XP containing just images have an additional view option of Filmstrip view. With this view you can scroll through your images below and view them enlarged above. You can also rotate your images from within Filmstrip view.

Picture folders also contain special commands within their Tasks pane.

From the Picture Tasks pane you can view a slide show, order prints online, print selected pictures, or set a selected picture as the desktop background.

Paint is Windows' included image editing software. Since it was originally designed as a crude drawing/painting application, it has few useful tools for working with photographs. You can flip, rotate, or resize an image, as well as save it in multiple formats, but that is the extent of Paint's abilities.

Microsoft supplies Image Resizer as part of PowerToys for XP (though it is not part of Windows XP). This PowerToy lets you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.

XP has an assistant to resize an image for you when sending it via email (select Send To > Mail Recipient from a file's contextual menu).

Clicking the "Show more options" link lets you set the dimensions of the resized image:

This dialog box contains a usability gaff, however, because a user could make contradictory selections (as shown above). Though it is unlikely that a user would click "Show more options" after selecting "Keep the original sizes," it is poor usability design to allow contradictory options to be selected.

Conclusion

Although iPhoto is considered the de facto photo management application for OS X, it is unfortunately not shipped as part of the operating system. Users of older computers who upgrade their operating system will have to purchase the latest version of iPhoto separately. That being said, Image Capture provides some photo management capabilities, though it is no match for iPhoto's feature set. Microsoft has chosen to integrate photo management directly into Windows, eliminating the need for a separate application.

Mac OS X: 4
Windows XP: 6

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