JetPhoto Studio

If you have a digital camera, then you must also have stacks of photos on your hard drive. The basic features that come with Windows will not be of much help when it comes to organizing all your pictures. Placing them in different folders is a start, but when there are too many, a specific set of pictures will become harder to find. This is where JetPhoto Studio comes in. Its user friendly interface will help you organize your photos in albums with great ease, manage them and much more.

You can get the application for free, if you want it for personal use. First, you must download the 16.5 Mb setup kit, unzip and run it. The process will not take long due to a standard wizard which will guide you step by step all the way. You can find versions for both Windows (2K/XP/Vista/7) and Mac OS (10.5 / 10.6 / 10.7).

JetPhoto Studio's interface was designed for ease of access. When launched, you will find a series of large, shiny buttons for creating a new album, browsing and opening an existing one, importing photos from a digital camera and more. Besides these buttons, a number of hyperlinks will let you open recent albums instantly. After choosing to create or open an album, you will have access to the program's main features, all accessible via navigation tabs, found under the top menus. Images can be added on the main area of the interface either by browsing for them or by clicking and dragging them from an explorer window. Their basic information, like name, size, creation date and more, will be displayed on a tabbed column on the right side of the window.

Photos can be viewed one by one under the Detail tab, where you can make some basic adjustments to a picture by clicking one of the buttons on the bottom edge of the interface. These include rotating an image, cropping it, converting it to greyscale or sepia and setting brightness, contrast and color levels. Other buttons, found in the same area, will let you start a slide show, print an image, set it as the desktop's background or create a wallpaper for your mobile phone. When choosing this last option, a new window will be brought up where you can crop what part of an image you want on your phone. The resolution can be set automatically by choosing the make and model of your phone from two drop menus. When the adjustments are done, the wallpaper can be sent to the phone via WAP or infrared. Alternatively, the wallpaper can be saved as file if you want to transfer it with a data cable.

Photos can also be viewed as thumbnails, just like in a standard explorer window. After switching to this view, other options will be made available on the lower edge of the window. These include uploading the album to Filckr, synchronizing it with a FPT server, creating a Flash gallery, and more. Another feature of JetPhoto Studio is geotagging an image. If you want to remember or show someone where you have taken a picture, you can save a waypoint on a Google powered map. Simply click the Geotag tab on the main window's right side column and you will find options for manual or automatic geotagging. Using the automatic tagging mode involves importing tracks from a GPS device, locating a photo and then, you can even create a Google Map web gallery, or link it to Google Earth. Tagging a picture manually is not hard. Clicking this option will connect you to map server on a different window. The map is similar to Google Earth and you can save an image's location as a GPS waypoint with a click of the mouse.