Why Do You Need An Image Buddy For Your Mac?

Here’s the deal. You take a lot of photos with that digital camera. You llove iPhoto but you want it to do more than it does.

You can’t afford Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture to manage a lot of photos, let alone Microsoft’s now expensive Expression. What to do? Maybe you need a buddy. An ImageBuddy? Maybe.

There is not a shortage of applications and utilities to manage photos for Mac users. Apple gives us the highly capable iPhoto for free. It’s decent at managing thousands of photos.

iPhoto also has some handy tools for manipulating images and plenty of printing and sharing options. So, what else do you need? Why would ImageBuddy make a difference in your digital photo life?

After using ImageBuddy, I’m not so sure.

ImageBuddy is a digital image layout program for Mac users. It has a handful of features you won’t find in iPhoto’s printing settings. ImageBuddy lets you layout images on a page for printing.

It’s not a difficult tool to master and performs a number of functions that are not easily or inexpensively obtained in other utilities for Mac photo users.

For example, the Contact Sheet is easy to set up.

Let ImageBuddy import photos from a folder. Setting up a contact sheet with multiple rows and columns is just point and click. Change the gap between rows and columns with a click.

Add watermarks, drop shadows, borders, even a background image just by clicking the Contact Sheet’s tools. Add captions, change page numbers, and modify the color level. That’s just the contact sheet.

If you want to print out photos on a page, click the Page Layout tab. Then drag and drop images from the image viewer and space out accordingly on the page. Scale to fit, add many of the same functions as the Contact Sheet, including text placement.

ImageBuddy becomes a mini-layout utility for digital photos.

The View tab simply displays a larger view of your digital photo in the main window, with a scrolling list of the folder’s images in the right, and a horizontal scroll in the main viewers.

Even better is all the information you need about the image itself-- image size, flash, focal length, aperture, exposure time, whatever is captured in the original photo image can be displayed by ImageBuddy.

Images can be rotated left or right, dropped and moved around on a page, and pages can be saved and used again with different images.

The main View also has a rudimentary slide show setup which lets you change the number of seconds between slides, but not the transitions.

You’re hungry for more, right? Me, too. There’s no real image manipulation tools, color correction tools, enhancement tools. It’s just another way to look at your digital images and print them in a variety of ways.

If you’re dealing in many, many, many digital photos, ImageBuddy might be your friend. It might have been a great little utility back in 2002 when it was a Macworld Editor’s Choice Award Finalist. But this is 2008 and the world has changed.

Image browsing is easy in iPhoto and it’s free with every Mac. Granted, $19 isn’t much money, but I expect more from a Mac application that’s been around for years.

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