A decent alternative to preview?

pcjpcj
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I just got my first mac two weeks ago, and I'm loving it. However, there's one thing that's annoying me.



I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera and I like to view them quickly. In windows, I did this the standard picture viewer. Now, in preview I can do this too, but when I load up 500 pictures all at 6megapixels, it takes almost forever. What my windows machine did was, it only loaded the one I was looking at, and when I pressed right, it loaded the next one, instead of loading them all at once.



Is there a way to make preview do that? Or is there an alternative program that will do it?



Thanks a lot.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by PCJ

    I just got my first mac two weeks ago, and I'm loving it. However, there's one thing that's annoying me.



    I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera and I like to view them quickly. In windows, I did this the standard picture viewer. Now, in preview I can do this too, but when I load up 500 pictures all at 6megapixels, it takes almost forever. What my windows machine did was, it only loaded the one I was looking at, and when I pressed right, it loaded the next one, instead of loading them all at once.



    Is there a way to make preview do that? Or is there an alternative program that will do it?



    Thanks a lot.




    Apple bundles another little app with MacOS X called iPhoto. If you allow iPhoto to download your pictures, it will file them in folders based on the dates that they were taken. This will simplify the use of an alternative picture browser. I am very high on GraphicConverter. It is shareware, but it works without paying the shareware fee. Adobe's Photoshop Elements 3.0 is a 99 USD commercial application with superior editing capabilities compared to those of GraphicConverter. Its picture-browsing abilities are roughly the same.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    mimacmimac Posts: 872member
    iPhoto is the app. you need (you should have it already if you've bought a new Mac). Once you have loaded your pics into your Mac it is extremely quick and easy to browse through them all and even do some minor alteration work (red eye, cropping, enhance, re-touch, contrast).

    You can also e-mail, print and burn to CD.



    iPhoto
  • Reply 3 of 7
    Preview is one of the apps that is slated for a dramatic improvement in 10.4 (Tiger) and co-incidentally this will solve many of the issues you are describing. But the other posters are correct that iPhoto is probably the app to go with for this, unless you are talking about truly massive libraries. Then there are professional solutions for that sort of thing (and there is some noise that iPhoto is going to get another upgrade towards that end).



    Oh... and for what it was designed for, Preview.app in 10.3 is a good program. But I am really looking forward to the improved version.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    pcjpcj Posts: 2member
    thanks for the replies. iPhoto still needs a lot of time to import the 3000+ photos I already have on the hard drive (sometimes I wish I hadn't bought a Nikon D70), but the way I understand it, I won't have to wait for them to load from them on.

    edit: This might only be a problem because I'm using a 12" ibook with 1.2ghz and 256mb RAM, not the fastest mac out there.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    mcqmcq Posts: 1,543member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by PCJ

    thanks for the replies. iPhoto still needs a lot of time to import the 3000+ photos I already have on the hard drive (sometimes I wish I hadn't bought a Nikon D70), but the way I understand it, I won't have to wait for them to load from them on.

    edit: This might only be a problem because I'm using a 12" ibook with 1.2ghz and 256mb RAM, not the fastest mac out there.




    Add 256 ram whenever you're able to. It'll make things much smoother on the OS in general.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    iPhoto is great for organizing your pictures but I don't like viewing photos on it. Call me picky but I like to be able to look at my pictures either full screen or half screen etc and go through them at my leisure. The only way you can view your pics larger than the iPhoto provided window is to start a slideshow, which I would rather not do. I would much rather keep my photos organized in folders rather than in iPhoto, but I guess I haven't fully converted from my former PC self...
  • Reply 7 of 7
    maccrazymaccrazy Posts: 2,658member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by PCJ

    I just got my first mac two weeks ago, and I'm loving it. However, there's one thing that's annoying me.



    I take a lot of pictures with my digital camera and I like to view them quickly. In windows, I did this the standard picture viewer. Now, in preview I can do this too, but when I load up 500 pictures all at 6megapixels, it takes almost forever. What my windows machine did was, it only loaded the one I was looking at, and when I pressed right, it loaded the next one, instead of loading them all at once.



    Is there a way to make preview do that? Or is there an alternative program that will do it?



    Thanks a lot.




    you could use iPhoto as someone suggested or you could use column view in finder to get small previews, make the column wider for larger images. Hope this helps.
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