2 superb new image viewers for Mac OS X

QPict is everything the Mac version of ACDSee should have been. And ArcherPro is the fastest image viewer OS X has ever seen.

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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

2 superb new image viewers for Mac OS X: QPict and Archer Pro

Aug. 18, 2002

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   Apple's OS X, the Unix operating system software that comes standard on all Macintoshes, is just a kid compared to Windows. Even the biggest fans of OS X will tell you the new Mac operating system has a lot of growing up to do.
   This has been especially true in graphics software. Most image editors and picture viewers made for OS X are as immature as OS X itself, offering little competition for the software available for Windows or for Apple's previous Macintosh operating system. The two big exceptions are at opposite ends of the scale ? Adobe's powerful professional editing software, Photoshop, at the high end and Apple's delightful iPhoto software for image viewing and organizing at the other end.
   But the drought is ending. This week I'm reporting on two new image viewers for Mac OS X, and next week I'll review specialized photo software, including a surprising (and expensive) competitor for Photoshop.
   Image viewers are not the same as image editors. Image editors give you a way to crop, manipulate and otherwise improve digital photos. Most of them do that fairly well, but nearly all of them are terrible at simply showing images.
   That's why you need a good image viewer. OS X users are lucky: Apple's iPhoto software is a superb image viewer. It's also outstanding for organizing images.
   Why, then, would you want to try out any other image viewer and organizer? If you've used iPhoto for more than a few weeks, you probably already know the answer. It's a closed system. Photos can't be viewed, organized and catalogued until iPhoto pulls them into a mysterious database. (I know where the database lives, but it's still mysterious.) There's no quick way of doing something as simple as viewing three of four images in a folder. (The quick viewer built into OS X, a program called Preview, is good for viewing single images, but has no cataloging or thumbnailing built in.)
   When you need to browse through your already cataloged photos, iPhoto is fine. But when you want to page through images stored in a folder, you need one of the programs I'm reviewing this week.
   They are ArcherPro from www.parkersoftware.com and QPict from www.qpict.net. ArcherPro is $30; QPict is $35. You can try both of them for free.
   ArcherPro is a fancy version of Archer, a free OS X image viewer. (Get it from www.parkersoftware.com also.) ArcherPro has enough extra features to justify the price -- the way it lets you move images to various storage folders with a quick press of a key is outstanding, to name just one extra function. It has another advantage nothing else can touch: ArcherPro is the fastest image viewer OS X has ever seen. If you have a fast Mac, ArcherPro will run slide shows with such fast "frame rates" that the slide shows look like movies. (Try it and you will realize I'm not exaggerating.)
   And ArcherPro is unique in providing keyboard control for every possible operation. That makes ArcherPro ideal for presentations in which you can't easily reach a mouse. Mostly, of course, it's fantastic for viewing large images, which it loads amazingly quickly. (Most of my digital photos are uncompressed files ranging from 20 to 40 megabytes in size, with some reaching 60 megabytes. Archer Pro loads them quickly.)
   QPict is almost as fast -- perhaps even faster for some kinds of images -- and adds image cataloging and batch operations. For example, you can convert all images in a collection from one format to another, or even from one format to TWO other ones at the same time. QPict doesn't have all the keyboard control Archer and Archer Pro have, but it seems to have an intuitively correct balance between what you can do at the keyboard and what you can do with the mouse.
   QPict has much of the "feel" of ACDSee, the superb Windows image viewer and cataloguer. Because the Mac version of ACDSee is wimpy and sluggish, I was overjoyed to discover that QPict is everything the Mac version of ACDSee should have been. If you are familiar with the Windows version of ACDSee, you are due for a treat when you install QPict for OS X.
   Next: From GraphicConverter at $30 to PhotoRetouch Pro at $750: How Mac OS X image editors stack up against the best Windows versions.