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As prices in digital cameras and media drops lower and lower
more people are taking more and more pictures. With all these pictures
there needs to be a convenient way to display and organize all your digital
photos. Preclick is a free little program (literally its only 658KB download)
that will help make such a task easier.
 Once
installed and you open the program it will automatically search your “My
Pictures” folder for any pictures that might be stored there. However
this means that Preclick will not automatically take pictures off your
camera or scanner for you. You must still manually download your pictures
from your device. If you store your pictures elsewhere you can add a folder
to the list by clicking in the little drop down menu. This could get a
little tedious if you have pictures all over your computer though you
can also just select an entire drive and have that scanned. This is what
we did to help test how quickly and accurately a scan is done. It does
a scan that seems almost too zippy for what it will find. It found 3400
pictures on my hard drive in about 7 minutes. It will seek out all jpg,
bmp, and gif files. Once the pictures are found you can select each photo
individually and assign ratings, change the title, add captions, date,
place, event, and subjects. This is great for remembering what each picture
was about or who each person was. You can also do searches based on what
you have entered into these fields as well as have full screen slideshow
with just a click of a button. Preclick even has a couple of basic editing
tools like automatic color correction, red eye remover, Make Black and
White, and Make Sepia, and rotate.
 The
automatic color correction does a pretty good job of determining if the
picture is to light or dark and adjusts accordingly, however it would
be nice to have the ability to adjust things to your personal taste. The
red eye function does its job as long as the user selects where the eyes
are. Another useful feature is the email function which reduces your pictures
down to around 50KB so they are more convenient for e-mailing, Preclick
will then open your default mail client so you can send them to whoever
you feel like. This really makes sending multiple pictures a lot easier
especially for those who have limited bandwidth, ie. Dial-up connections.
The main disadvantage to this program is that there is no
way to print a picture from your computer. This program has partnered
with a site called dotPhoto where you can upload your pictures and they
will print them out and send them to you for around $0.29 a print plus
shipping and handling. Although this would suite some people’s needs,
like those who did not spend the money on an expensive photo printer,
this could also be quite annoying for those who did. To print from a printer
you will need to use an outside program like Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop,
etc.… This can get to be a hassle when you have to have several
programs running at the same time, especially on a budget system with
not a lot of ram.
Overall this is a pretty decent little program that handles
the small niche it was designed for and for free it’s a great value.
It does exactly what it was designed to do and it does it well. The interface
is simple, easy to use, it scrolls through your pictures quickly, allows
easy view to all you pictures without hunting through file structures.
Its shortfalls do hurt it some though for free there is not much more
you can ask for. A lot of freedom in editing would make this an absolutely
superb program for the cost, but development for such a thing would probably
require the program to cost money which would bring it up to the price
of superior products. I guess the saying of you get what you pay for will
always reign true.
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8 / 10 |
OVERALL SCORE
86%
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10 / 10 |
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10 / 10 |
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7 / 10 |
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8 / 10 |
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8.6 / 10 |
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