Compupic, Thumbs Plus: 2 outstanding image organizers

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Compupic is the fastest thumbnail maker you can find.

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Compupic and Thumbs Plus: 2 outstanding image organizers

Jan. 20, 2002

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   I'll bet the friendly sales help at the discount store forgot to tell you one thing when you bought your digital camera. They didn't warn you that you might never be able to find all your pictures.
   Chances are there will always be a few dozen photos you simply can't locate. If they were the shots of Aunt Maybelle's garden club, you might not miss them. But if they were the priceless images you took of little Johnny's kindergarten graduation, you'd never forgive yourself.
   That's why you need an image manager.
   Don't get nervous. I use the term "image manager" loosely. Anything that can create and store thumbnail-size versions of your pictures while allowing you to view, copy, move or delete the originals qualifies as an image manager.
   Programs that create thumbnails have been around a long time. To be image managers, however, they have to link the thumbnails to the full-size images, so that clicking (or double clicking) on a thumbnail opens the full-size version of the picture. Further, image managers should always know where all the images represented by thumbnails are stored. They should prompt you to insert the correct CD, for example, if the original is stored on a CD.
   In many cases, that's enough. If you can quickly look through a few hundred thumbnail images to find the picture you want, you won't need fancier software.
   But sooner or later you'll probably need real image-management software. That's why you should carefully consider the two programs I'm describing this week, Thumbs Plus and Compupic. They're free to try for a limited period, and you can order them right from their Web sites. Compupic (www.photodex.com) is a bargain at $40; Thumbs Plus (www.cerious.com) costs $80. (A more powerful version of Compupic, the "Pro" version, costs $100.)
   Thumbs Plus and Compupic work the same basic way. Folders are shown in a left-hand pane and image files are shown at the right, in thumbnail form. By default, each program displays thumbnails in a medium size, but you can choose larger or smaller sizes.
   Even non-image files such as stored Web pages, Microsoft Word documents, fonts and icons can be displayed as thumbnails, if you wish. (I usually turn off the display of all non-image files as thumbnails, but you might like the effect.)
   Double-clicking a thumbnail image displays the original, either full-screen or in a window. Both let you delete an image by selecting it and pressing the Delete key.
   In both programs, pressing a sequence key such as Page Down displays the original images one by one, bypassing the thumbnail display.
   And both can perform slide shows of all the images in a folder and its sub-folders. This can be very impressive if you set up the software to auto-size all images and show them full-screen. "Auto-size" means pictures smaller than the screen are enlarged and pictures larger than the screen are reduced to fit.
   Both also can function as slide show screen savers. Compupic even has an additional slide show mode that displays many images at the same time, in a tiled pattern, with each tile changing in sequence.
   Both programs let you attach descriptions (annotations) to each image file. You can choose to view or ignore annotations at any time, and both programs let you search the annotations.
   Both also provide basic image-editing functions. Thumbs Plus does better, but you should not expect either program to substitute for a standard image editor. (If you don't yet have a good image editor, my recommendation is Photo-Brush, from www.mediachance.com. It's an incredible bargain at $38, and you can try it for free.)
   Both Compupic and Thumbs Plus can convert images from one format to another, either singly or in groups ("batches"). Batch conversions alone don't make Thumbs Plus or Compupic special -- Irfan View, the spectacular freeware image viewer from www.irfanview.com, can do this sort of thing nicely -- but Thumbs Plus adds a feature that sets it apart: You can do image-editing functions in batch mode, too.
   You could, for example, change all 16-bit ("high color") JPEG images in a folder to true color BMPs, cropping and sharpening them at the same time. In the years that I've used Thumbs Plus, I've found its batch editing functions alone worth much more than what I paid for the entire program. (I bought Thumbs Plus in the autumn of 1995. I've paid for an upgrade once; all other upgrades have been free.)
   But as good as Thumbs Plus is, I usually run Compupic instead. Compupic ranks only a few notches below Thumbs Plus in overall features, but beats Thumbs Plus in one important respect. Compupic is the fastest thumbnail maker you can find.
   If all your image files are small -- under a megabyte, maybe -- you probably would be happier with Thumbs Plus. But if you're like me, you probably have a mixture of large and small image files. My smallest files, apart from ones I post on my Web site or mail to my sister, are about 4 megabytes. The largest, all of them scans of 35mm slides and negatives, are from 20 megabytes to 60 megabytes.
   Thumbs Plus cannot make thumbnails of these large images quickly enough on any of the PCs in our media room. Compupic, however, has no problem. Informal (and, alas, unscientific) speed tests show that Compupic is as much as 10 times faster than Thumbs Plus.
   Whether you need the speed of Compupic or the advanced features of Thumbs Plus, you can hardly go wrong with either one. But let me pass along a caution: When you install either one, be very cautious about assigning file types. Neither one needs to have any file types assigned to work properly. Let me explain.
   When you assign the file type "FOO," for example -- I'm using a made-up type here -- Windows makes the program assigned to that file type open every file with a "FOO" filename extension. So if "FOO" files were image files that Compupic knew how to display, Compupic would show "FOO" as one of the file types it can handle, and it would ask you (probably during installation) if you wanted Compupic to take over that file association.
   If you agree, any time you double clicked on a "FOO" file, Compupic would run and then open the file to show it to you. (Thumbs Plus would so the same thing if you assigned the file type to it.)
   That's almost surely NOT what you want Compupic or Thumbs Plus to do. Compupic and Thumbs Plus are image managers. They weren't designed to be instant image viewers. They're too slow to serve as quick image viewers. You don't want them to lumber to life just to show you a single image that you've clicked on.
   So be sure to install a real image viewer such as Irfan View. Let that program take over all image file associations. When you double click on an image file, you want your image viewer to snap into action and show you the image, nothing more. When you want to view thumbnails and do image management, you run Thumbs Plus or Compupic.
   Again: when you install Compupic or Thumbs Plus, don't assign ANY image file types to them. Don't let them take over ANY image file types. Let Irfan View (or your own choice of a speedy image viewer) handle all the image file types. You'll lose nothing. Thumbs Plus and Compupic will still function perfectly and you'll gain an immense amount of flexibility. You'll have instant image viewing and superb image management.