Use Pictomio to organise digital photos

When the site loads, click the Download button. At the next screen, check the minimum requirements (especially the graphics card) and then click Start Download. At the next screen, click Download Now and ignore any browser warnings (in Internet Explorer a bar along the top will ‘flash’. Just left-click on it and choose Download File). Then, click the Save button in the File Download dialogue box.

When the Save As dialogue box appears, click the Save button to download the file and when that finishes, click the Open Folder button. (Alternatively, if the file downloads to a specific location, use Windows’ commands to locate and open it). Double-click the icon to start installing the program, ignore any Windows’ security warnings and then follow the setup wizard, accepting all of the defaults. At the final dialogue box, click the Finish button and the program will load.

And here’s Pictomio running for the first time. It packs plenty of features into this stylish interface, so take a moment to check out the tabs at the very top (Browse and Slideshow) as well as those in the left-hand panel (File Systems and Library) and the ones in the main window (Thumbnails, Filmstrip, Single Image, Carousel and Map). Then, note the tabs down the extreme right-hand side that can be used to display information when a specific photo is being viewed in the main window.

Start by looking at some of the photos that are included with Windows. We are using Vista here but XP also includes a few. Make sure the File System tab is selected in the left-hand panel, then click the little arrow next to Shared Pictures and then click the Sample Pictures folder underneath it to open the contents in the main window as shown here. We are looking at the default view (Thumbnails) but in subsequent steps we will also use some of the other views.

Here we are looking at another of Pictomio’s views. First we clicked on the Filmstrip tab that runs along the top of the main window to change the view and then we clicked on one of the photos in the strip along the top. That is now being displayed in the main window underneath. After that, rolling the cursor over the main photo reveals a selection of Pictomio tools that enables you to rotate the image, annotate it, zoom in and out using the slider control and more.

The tabs down the right-hand side also contain interesting information. Whether it is all available depends on the device that was used to take the original photograph but the general Image Info is available for every picture. To open any of these tabs, just roll the mouse pointer over them. Here it is possible to add an annotation to the picture, add categories and tags (like all library programs the more photos are tagged and categorised, the better) or just drag across the Rating box at the top to award one to five stars like so.

Before we leave this view, let’s have a look at another couple of features. First, notice the small icons at the top right of the main window? These allow us to move the position of the film strip around the main photo so it runs along the top, bottom or right-hand side. Second, by clicking the Filter button (it looks like a funnel) you can choose to display only those photos that fit a particular category or, as we are showing in this screenshot, those that have a five-star rating.

Notice too how each thumbnail in the strip along the top has got icons in each corner. One lets us change the star rating, one displays a little pop-up information box while the two arrows at the bottom corners rotate the picture left or right. Here we have rotated this photo and then clicked on the Color Picker tool; this is useful for designers and people making blogs and websites because it lets them match their site’s colour scheme to the colours in a photograph. Click the Apply button to keep any changes.

To display all of the photos again, just click the Filters button and then remove the tick in the Filters box at the top of the dropdown menu. Then, roll the mouse pointer over to the left-hand panel and click the Library tab. Here we can see the range of pre-defined filters that Pictomio includes to let us display and use our photographs in different ways. We have navigated down the list to the Rating icon and opened it and clicked the five-stars rating. Now, Pictomio will only display photos that have been rated that highly.

But Pictomio is even cleverer than that. Scroll down the various filters in the list on the left and you will see that it is also possible to group pictures by orientation (whether they are portrait or landscape) as well as their exposure time, shutter speed, aperture, focal length and so on. Assuming the devices used to take the photos supply this information, this makes it a powerful tool for serious photographers with large libraries of pictures. It is even fun for amateurs. Here we have chosen to only look at pictures taken on a Nokia mobile phone.

Pictomio also makes it easy to create very effective slideshows. Simply select the photos for the presentation­ – here we have gone back to the five-starred sample pictures from Step 9 – and then click the big button at the bottom of the screen that has a small strip of film on it. This starts the Pictomio slideshow that includes all the controls necessary for controlling it as well as some interesting transition effects that can be applied between slides. Just press the Escape key to close the show.

Alternatively, it’s easy to construct slideshows ‘by hand’ as it were. Here we have clicked the Slideshow tab next to the Browse tab at the top left. Pictomio then displays thumbnails of the currently selected photographs in the right-hand window. Just drag and drop the ones you want to use onto the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Re-arrange photos in the show by dragging and dropping them in the bottom window and change the transitions by clicking the icon in between photos and picking one off the menu.

Pictomio can also be used to get photos on and off popular online services like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and Photobucket. Let’s download some pictures from Picasa. Click the Browse tab again and then use the folders on the left to navigate to the location on the PC where you want the photos to be stored, then click the download button on the button bar (it has a blue arrow on it). Select the service and then follow the instructions to sign in.

Some services need permission to let external programs like Pictomio access them but just follow the instructions and it will set itself up in a few moments. With Picasa, the Download photos dialogue box displays the folders where different pictures are stored. Double-click on one to open it, then use the tick boxes to select those photos to download and then click the Download Photos button to begin. This is a handy way for Pictomio users to get local copies of photos that are stored online.