JetPhoto. Photo Gallery For Mac Or Windows. It’s Free.

My senses are dulled with the dullness that only new mothers truly know. Other than childbirth, I don’t have an excuse for why I missed a freeware application that’s really this good.

Oh, by the way, the Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming! And I mean that in a good way.

I say that because JetPhoto comes from a group of application developers in Shanghai, China. Obviously, they have a love of Macs because the Mac version of JetPhoto is excellent.

It’s tough to argue with the price, though JetPhoto faces competition from the multi-platform JAlbum and France’s Galerie. Both create great photo albums and both are free.

JetPhoto just smacks of Mac developers who “get it.” Simple, straightforward, intuitive, and “it just works.” Oh, and it’s useful, too.

While JetPhoto isn’t a professional photographer’s answer to Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, it will organize and store digital photos. Big whoop, you say?

Yes, there’s at least twenty-eleven other applications that do the same thing and for nearly the same price. Free.

JetPhoto is a bit different in that it comes with both a desktop version you can use on your own photos and a server version to make your photos available to the rest of the world.

The server version of JetPhoto is PHP-based so it’ll also function on a Mac OS X desktop, which, with a little jurry rigging, can become a server.

The real trick to JetPhoto is the near seamless integration with your desktop version, both Mac and Windows, and the server version which lets you build a searchable photo web site.

This goes far beyond the web page and photo albums of Galerie and JAlbum.

JetPhoto Studio is the desktop version which runs on your Mac, so you can use it to find digital photos, organize them into albums, and share them—by printing, exporting, uploading, whatever.

Add keyword tags, notes, and other information—even use a photo calendar or a GPS-given photo locator (admittedly, I haven’t tried that feature yet—I’m not much on directions and still hoping my baby is where I left her a few minutes ago).

You can resize digital photos in JetPhoto Studio, add watermarks, and one-click generate a creidble Flash movie of your chosen photo album.

Always looking ahead, the developers of JetPhoto have included the ability to create pocket albums for cell phones.

Is that a solution looking for a problem or the perfect way for a proud mommy to show off 1,389 new photos of new baby? You be the judge.

Evereything gets created in an Album and JetPhoto lets you create as many as you can remember. If you have a web site that lets you use PHP’s scripting language applications, the free JetPhoto Server will synchronize with you Albums and create a web site that’s searchable.

Very handy is the built-in integration with iPhoto, so you don’t have to scrap Apple’s used-to-be freebie photo organizer for another with fewer though different features.

JetPhoto will let you select and import an Album directly from iPhoto.

The Calendar function looks more oppressive than it really is. If you use JetPhoto to import photos, then they’ll get tagged by date, which shows up in calendar form, making it even easier to create new Albums and find photos.

Why is this application free? I really don’t know, but the first impression you’ll get is the same as mine. “Wow. This is nice. Well done.”

It’s not all good news, though. There’s only three templates in JetPhoto and they’re nothing to write home about. Galeria and JAlbum have many, many, many more. A wide variety of templates is very important, because, as we all know, there’s no accounting for taste.

Second, the digital photo file sizes are huge, even by broadband standards (remember, nearly half the country is still using dial up). A little file compression goes a long way.

Still, it’s tough to beat the price. Did I mention that it’s free?

Click Here to look at the details of JetPhoto Studio and Server, and the download link.