Freeware 2

Freeware – is there such a thing as a free lunch?

Oscar’s JPEG Thumb - Maker http://www.mediachance.com/free/index.html 6/10

Thumbnail images needn’t be just for use on the web, you can use them in PowerPoint presentations or other multimedia applications. Oscar’s JPEG Thumb – Maker is another utility for creating thumbnail sized images. This has a very simple interface which will get you creating thumbnails within minutes. The same test batch of 134 images converted and saved to 200 x 200 thumbnails took Oscar 1min 28sec to complete (a marked improvement on Easy Thumbnails, although no other enhancements were being applied). Oscar’s Thumb – Maker’s main drawback is that it’s limited to JPEG images only. However, there are options for adjusting quality, image adjustment and fitting of images within the values you define. A simple application that will prove useful time after time.

EyeBrowse v2.6 http://www.eyebrowse.co.uk/ 6/10

A graphics editing and management application, EyeBrowse is perhaps not the most intuitive application I have come across. I am still not entirely sure what the application is trying to achieve. The screen is divided into four panes; Directories, the files, Fileseek, and the main image window. Click on a folder in the Directory pane and the image names appear in the files pane. Unfortunately, that is all you will see unless you click on a file then it appears in the main image window. You can do a few basic operations on the image like flip, brightness and contrast, blur, sharpen etc. There is also a batch rename function, this is very fast and will rename a whole folder in seconds, you enter a name and the numbers are added. The Fileseek function is a basic search, open a folder where you want to find an image, enter the image title or part of it, and it will find it for you. This is all very well if you give each individual picture a unique name, but if you have just used the batch rename feature then all the pictures are going to have the same name – with a different number of course. A limited use application.

ImageForge http://www.cursorarts.com/ 8/10

A neat application with some nice features. Click on the Open image button and a file directory opens, navigate to your image folder and click on an image name. A preview appears in the right pane, but the average digital camera picture will be too big to display in the pane. Annoyingly there is no zoom out feature at this stage. ImageForge has a lot of useful features including, brush, brush styles, gradients, clone tool, clipart spray tool, magnify, crop, eraser etc. The clipart spray is just awful, its function is no more than pasting clipart all over your images and the supplied clipart is yuck!

On the menus there are a number of effects that include; Posterize, Line engrave, Threshold, Auto contrast amongst others. ImageForge has a lot to offer and at the asking price of $0.00 who can complain. Of course if you want more useful features then you could upgrade to the Pro version at $28.95. On the whole this is not a bad application that could interest someone enough to progress onto more advanced software.