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  #1  
Old 02-19-2010, 04:00 PM
Monty Gibson
Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 434
Default Resco Photo Manager 7.02 Reviewed

 

Product Category: Software
Manufacturer: Resco
Where to Buy: Mobihand [Affiliate]
Price: $24.95 USD
System Requirements: Windows Mobile 5.x or 6.x.

Pros:

  • GPS Phototagging (with a GPS enabled Windows Mobile phone);
  • New finger friendly touch features;
  • Ability to create photo albums.

Cons:

  • Slightly expensive for some, but it’s an excellent program.

Summary: Resco Photo Manager 7.02 has really come a long way from its humble beginnings. This piece of software is a total re-write of their old Resco Photo Viewer and Photo Viewer Pro.

Finger Friendly

With the advent of GPS photo tagging becoming more and more popular, Resco improved on its older versions and added this feature which works flawlessly. They’ve also made the entire program finger gesture friendly to enable you to take a photo with your Windows Mobile phone and also edit, tag and view them without ever having to use a stylus.   

Images Supported 

  • JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, CFX, PSD, PCX, RAB, PGM, PPM;
  • RAW, CRW, CR2, RAF, MRW, NEF, ORF, PEF;
  • Fax formats;
  • Multipage Tiff supported;
  • 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 & 32 bit formats supported;
  • Transparency and ALPHA formats supported;
  • Animated GIFs;
  • Support of EXIF & IPTC meta tags.

Editing On The Fly

 

Figure 1: Contrast, Brightness and Color Editor.

As most of us in the Windows Mobile world know, our tiny 3 to 5 megapixel cameras just sometimes does not do justice to a photograph. Luckily for us Resco managed to include the ability to change contrast, brightness and saturation levels. You can even change the ratio of red, green and blue levels in the photograph itself. If you’re not a professional photographer there’s always the handy “Reset” button. This feature is very handy, especially for me since I always tend to over correct my photographs and everyone tends to look purple. From here you can upload your photographs to your favourite online picture sharing site:

 

Figure 2: Upload your photograph to one of many online sharing sites.

Geo Tagging And Annotations

Let’s say that you found the best sushi bar restaurant and just have to capture it on film. Better yet, you want to remember where this restaurant was and perhaps you fell in love with a particular dish that you never had before and want to make a notation of what it was that you ordered, so that you can order it again when you come back. No problem. Resco Photo Manager allows for Geo Tagging (with a GPS capable Windows Mobile phone), written and voice annotations!

Figure 3: GPS tagging the photo location and annotations.   

Figure 4: Using Google Maps to locate where the photograph was taken.

After you have made your GPS Geo tag you can click on the satellite icon and it will automatically use your default browser to locate it on Google Maps, which is quite fascinating really. The HTC Touch Cruise version is only one Windows Mobile phone that I know of that allows for Geo Tagging photographs. There may be more, but with this software you need not buy a specific Windows Mobile phone to Geo Tag photographs. And better yet, you can find that sushi bar and order your favorite dish when you’re trying to get your sushi cravings under control. 

Other Features

Of course what would a photo managing program be without a slideshow function? Of course this program includes probably one of the best I’ve seen, with the ability to use different transitions from one picture to the next. It also allows music to be played (whichever .MP3 you have on your device) to your liking as the photographs are being displayed and more.

 

Figure 5: Slideshow controls

Next, being able to take a snapshot of a friend or other object (read Sushi Bar) to remember someone or something by and being able to save that to your contacts is handy when you can also edit that photograph to your liking as well.

 

Figure 6: Cropping an image

  • Image resize (multiple resize supported);
  • Image crop;
  • Set image as Home Screen;
  • Set image to contact;
  • Convert image to JPG,  PNG and BMP;
  • Gamma, contrast, brightness and RGB corrections;
  • Attach image drawings (lines, rectangles, circles, texts).

Conclusions

I’m a big fan of Resco. I’ve been using their products for years and they’ve continued to produce top of the line software for Windows Mobile phones. This particular piece of software I found to be very in depth and has made me want to use my camera more since this software gives me greater abilities to do so many things with my photographs that I simply couldn’t do before. To save and share memories, to remember where they were with Geo Tagging and to also create an annotation is similar to having a personal photo album everywhere you go and never missing out on a precious moment or memory again. There are MANY more options and features to this program that you must try in order to appreciate. This photo manager is the best one I’ve ever tested and I am sure that you will be pleased to have this in your arsenal of software.

Monty Gibson is a Registered Nurse who lives in Florida with his wife, 14 year old daughter and 8 month old son. He has been using Windows Mobile phones since the days of Windows CE and his first Pocket PC the HP Jornada. He loves high end electronics and builds water cooled high end computer rigs as a hobby.

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  #2  
Old 02-20-2010, 10:33 PM
Gerard
Pontificator
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 1,043

Resco picked up the ball years ago when BitBank more or less dropped it, when development of his PQView photo application stalled. There were some amazing features in that old program, but also a few bugs. At first I was slow to adopt Resco's viewer, as it used to be slower loading than the amazingly fast PQV. But that's ancient history. Resco has brought big improvements with every new edition of their viewers, and now that I'm using v7.03, the experience of browsing my pictures and sometimes manipulating gamma level, cropping, and other elements is a plain joy. The finger-friendly interface makes it so much easier for sharing images spontaneously, while the ways they've preserved the ability to use a stylus for more precise cropping and such is very handy. I still use Pocket Artist for more elaborate work with photos, such as focus correction in specific areas or dodging/burning and countless other Photoshop-like tools, but for basic photo management of images captured by my Kaiser's camera, Resco Photo Manager does the job very well indeed. I just hope they are able to make the jump to Windows Phone 7 Series, not that I'll be going there personally... but it'll be great for people who do.
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  #3  
Old 02-21-2010, 09:22 PM
buzzard
Theorist
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 276

No criticism of the Resco Photo Manager intended but I've been using the free Pocket XnView for years and often wondered if the Resco program is better and if so, how? The two programs appear to be very similar in the modifications that you can make to photos although Resco offers some of the other newer changes (e.g. finger friendly and GPS).

Last edited by buzzard; 02-21-2010 at 09:28 PM..
 
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  #4  
Old 02-21-2010, 10:27 PM
Gerard
Pontificator
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 1,043

Indeed, PocketXnView is very powerful and versatile. I used it as my main photo viewer for about six months or so, back when I found PQV wasn't working quite well enough in a few respects and development stopped (though I think Larry re-started work with that program at some point more recently). XnView is my default image viewer on the PC. But more recent versions changed the menu setup rather a lot in directions I don't find at all efficient for photo processing, buring things I use all the time in sub-menus, so I stick with v1.70.2 from summer of 2004. Works perfectly with Windows 7.

Phone use is a bit different for my uses with photos. For one, I'm not working with bigger images on the phone for the most part, rarely opening a 6Mp or larger image there like I do on the PC. Second big difference is the UI, where on the PC (an Asus 901 is my only PC now) keyboard accelerators make image processing very quick and easy for most functions, on the PPC/WM phone one is left to do most work with a stylus, or fingertip. So the whole UI has to be very different. I found Pocket XnView shared a bit too much with the desktop version, relying on a lot of digging into menus to get anything done. I just found Resco's operations to be a bit easier to access. And the final decision maker for me was that if all I want to do is flip through a folder full of images, Resco makes that fast and easy without getting in the way. I can open an image from a file explorer or open my DCIM folder on the card from a widget in SpbMobileShell and instantly be browsing my images, whether one at a time or in thumbnail list view, all with flips of the finger and the Action button to toggle between the two. XnView, last time I looked, seemed a bit more cumbersome in use. Still, a very nice program, and it's not possible to complain about the price.
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