If God made the human race in his own image, the question is, did he use Photoshop to air-brush out any rough edges? Or was he - or indeed she - more of a shareware sort of deity? If so, then perhaps heaven's fat broadband pipes have been used to bag a copy of ExifPro, an image viewer/editor that's a free trial download. Coughing up the asking price afterwards gets rid of a splash screen that interrupts the loading of the otherwise fully functional program.

After firing the application up for the first time, you can browse through your hard drive in an Explorer window while ExifPro automatically scans and catalogues any pictures therein, with a preview window showing a thumbnail of any image that's clicked upon. ExifPro also offers up a range of other interesting bits of information.

As well as displaying dates and times underneath the images, it catalogues them into a handy time-line in bar graph form. This allows the user to clearly see when the majority of photos were taken in a cluttered directory, and moreover you can click on any bar to see all the photos from a specific month. Other organisational tools include tags that can be applied to images to group them together (for example, your favourite landscape pics). It's all very smartly organised and presented, as is the interface all round.

ExifPro also reads information embedded in JPEG photos, called EXIF data - hence the name of the program. This includes an incredible amount of detail, from the make of the camera the picture was taken with to the ISO Rating, shutter speed, whether the flash was fired and its strength... over a hundred different parameters are recorded. Most won't be useful to the average user, of course, but it's still an interesting feature.

When it comes to image manipulation, ExifPro sports a range of basic tools. It's possible to adjust brightness and contrast levels, tweak the colour balance, and images can be lightened (or darkened) using a simple slider menu and gamma settings. Lossless JPEG cropping is offered (there's no resulting loss of image quality), as is lossless rotation. If you want to work on multiple images, batch editing is also possible.

Throw in a decent facility for generating your own photo slide-shows and that's pretty much your lot. ExifPro isn't exactly extensively featured, but it's a compact and quite nifty program, especially when you consider the fact that it's free to give it a whirl.

Verdict
A small but neatly formed image viewing package with some basic yet useful editing facilities. Well worth a trial download.

Company: ExifPro

Tags: exchangeable image file format god jpeg adobe photoshop photo manipulation windows explorer photoshop data