Photon: A New Pro Image Viewer for Leopard

Yesterday Green Volcano Software released Photon 1.0, a brand new image viewer and sorter for OS X. Photon lets you scan large sets of images for organizing and is compatible with everyone’s favororite new cat, Leopard. From the looks of it, I’d say it’s squarely aimed at professionals.

The first thing you notice with Photon, is that it’s fast. It can quickly scan a card, and puts full resolution previews into the application. Photon supports JPEG, PNG, and a wide variety of RAW image formats. Each import is put into a ‘Stack’, where you can view the photos Metadata as well as a histogram.

One of the best features of the app is how you view the photos. As a default setting, you see the whole image, fitted to the size of the window. Then, if you want to have a look around the photo, you simply click, it zooms in, and as you move your mouse around, you move the image. It’s a really good implementation of a simple feature, however it would be nice to see a setting that controls how far it zooms in when you click.

Earlier in the review, I mentioned ‘Stacks’. These make it very simple to sort photos before you put them into iPhoto. You simply drag a photo from one stack to another to move it, or you can create a new stack by dropping it onto some empty space. After you’ve finished sorting your photos, you can export the stack, and then import it into your preferred photo editor. If you need to quickly change the format of a stack of photos, you can do so in PNG, JPEG, TIFF and all of the usual export options.

The vast majority of the apps features have hot-keys attached to them, meaning if you’re a big fan of using your keyboard for everything, this could be for you. You can even add hot-keys to your stacks, so you can switch between them easily. I found Photon to be a really solid new app. It is quick, and the UI design is simplistic, making it easy to use. It would be nice to see some simple editing tools, such as cropping or an export button to Aperture/Lightroom, added, but I don’t think that is the focus of Photon.

Here is a feature list for Photon 1.0 from their website:

• Version 1.0 sports Leopard compatibility
• Full resolution image previews
• Support for RAW formats from many camera manufacturers
• Batch convert images to JPEG, PNG, PSD and many other formats
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts
• Automatically detects card readers and memory cards
• Supports multi-processor systems
• Full drag and drop support

Photon is available right now from photon-app.com. It normally retails at $69, however there is an introductory price of $49 if you order now.

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