When I switched to Macs earlier this year there were a few features of Windows XP that I missed. I’ve found workarounds for most of the things I liked, but there was one thats been bugging me. In Windows XP if you navigate to a folder full of pictures you can view the folder as a ‘Filmstrip’. This allows you to navigate through your images and see higher resolution previews than what the finder allows for in ‘View 3 Columns Layout’. Now that I’m using OS X, I find myself constantly opening images in Preview, usually many consecutive images in a folder.
But, today is the day! I’ve found a workaround for the last Windows XP feature that I miss. And Xee is the solution. Here’s what the developers of Xee have to say about their product.
Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface.
Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. It is very fast, and uses less memory than most other image viewing tools. It also uses OpenGL to display and scroll images much more smoothly than other viewers. Its interface is highly streamlined and has easily configurable keyboard shortcuts.
I know that iPhoto does all of what Xee does and more. But, sometimes I don’t feel like opening iPhoto to simply look at a few images. And as I stated earlier, Preview is inefficient at looking at multiple images. The drawer in Preview is nice, but it requires you to select which images you’d like to look at. There is no way to casually look at all the images in a folder with Preview. Thus the need for Xee.
Xee’s interface is clean and simple. There are a few buttons to navigate and rotate your images. At the bottom of the interface is a plethora of information ranging from file size to the date the picture was taken. While Xee provides the ability to crop photos its main use is to simply view your images.
I have yet to set Xee as the default application to open my photos. Once I get more time under my belt using it I’m sure that I will. If you have the same gripe about the small preview images in the finder and Previews inability to look at all the photos in a folder as I do then check out Xee. It’s worth a shot, especially since its FREE :)
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Nice! It’s always fun to find a new app that’s useful and easy to use. I think we tend to get so used to using certain programs that we don’t realize there are newer and better things available.
Its easy to get into a rut. Its hard to remember to check if there is new more efficient ways to accomplish things. I guess sometimes its easier to keep doing things the same way you’ve always been doing them than learning something new. This is one of my favorite parts about running Keynote 2 Keynote. It keeps me on my toes. I’m always on the lookout for new cool ways to accomplish tasks.
Thanks. FYI, using right click on your mouse, go to your folder with images in it and select all of them. When right click initiates, you will see the opportunity to select “Slideshow,” which then presents a slideshow of the images selected. Very cool and easy to use, at least for a quick review of your images. Preview or Xee may still make sense for other needs.
NeilKo
Nice tip. Another thing you can do with Preview is to hit Apple A while in a folder full of images and then hit Apple O. This will open a folder full of images in Preview putting all of them in the drawer. It works ok. I still like the ease of using Xee though.
This application is really cool, but still… is there an application able to make basic photo fixes and adjustments for Mac OS X?
Try ImageWell. You can crop, compress, rotate, and add simple shadows to your images with it. Thats what I use any time I need to do a quick crop/compress when I don’t want to fire up Photoshop. Its only downside is that you can’t save as a gif :(
The site looks great ! Thanks for all your help ( past, present and future !)
This is very good, a nice improvement (specially as it can see inside compressed folders), but it still doesn’t fix the problem, which is OS X doesn’t make icon previews of image files by default, so when you run into something like DSC000123.JPG (say, from your digital camera), you really don’t know what you’re looking at until you open it (or use column layout)
Here’s a guide to how to turn icon preview on: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2241/os_x_thumbnail_preview
You can then make the icons very large (up to 128×128 in 10.4 and 256×256 in 10.5) and voila! windows-like thumbnail previews. (if only it made images large and ignored the rest).
I have some couple hundreds of photos i organize in a remote wireless media hard drive which is accessed by several pcs, some not necessarily at home, and i keep my own scheme to organize them allby hand, needless to say, it’s a LOT more organized than what iPhoto does (which places them in folders with weird names, hard to follow if youre browsing them from a remote windows/linux machine).
-mp
UPDATE:
hm alright, so I said: “(if only it made images large and ignored the rest).”
well, it seems like it will be possible soon (Apple Patent: Apple’s Mac OS X may gain multi-sized icon interface / http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=2637 )
-mp
Wow Nice Find Mauricio!
Having the icon preview makes things not only easier to find the pic you want, but also makes folders full of image files look cool as well.
hi nice site.
hi all.