Windows Phone Thoughts: I'll Show You Mine! Spb Imageer Reviewed

Albums and Publishing
Like many other image management tools, Imageer lets you create albums of your images and play them as slideshows. There are plenty of slideshow options including using timed slide transitions and different transition types. Although there aren't quite as many transition types as Microsoft PowerPoint, there are plenty to choose from. This feature would have been close to perfect for me if it had VGA card support. That way I could show my photos as a presentation to a monitor or television. Some other Pocket PC graphics applications let you attach a soundtrack to a presentation. Imageer does not support this function. This wasn't a big deal to me but it might be for you.

In addition to the slideshow mode, Imageer supports direct publishing to the Fotki.com service. The publishing process is almost identical to album creation. The only difference is the destination of the output. Unfortunately, you can't change the publishing location to your own Web site.

Both processes were very simple to effect. There is a well thought out wizard that provides clear instructions and options at each stage. You can select image sizes, contrast and brightness control, image rotation, image renaming with support for automatic name prefixing and .jpeg quality.


Figure 11: Publishing to the Web and creating albums.

The Activesync Filter
Imageer adds an image filter to Activesync if you select that option at installation (it's on by default). This plug-in supports some image transitions should you use Activesync to transfer files to your Pocket PC. It lets you change image size, .jpeg quality and rotate the image as it's being sent to your Pocket PC. Although it's a nice feature, I personally would not use it often as I tend to use card readers for transferring data to storage cards on my Pocket PC. But it would be handy for small file transfers to my Pocket PC.


Figure 12: The Activesync plug-in.

Gotchas
Imageer is a very strong version 1 application release. However, there were a few things I found a little annoying.

• For some image edits I preferred to rotate the image before carrying out the edit. I found that when I activated the editing toolbar the image reverted back to its original orientation.
  
  
• The lack of VGA output was a limitation I'd like to see addressed. After all, the iPAQ Image Viewer that ships with the 2210 includes it.
  
  
• The auto-rotate option was a little annoying as it did not seem to work out the best orientation for many of my pictures. I ended up turning this function off.
  
  
• The Save As command is not easily accessed while editing a picture.
  
  
• You can't alter the location of where photos are published on the Web.
  
  

Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango [Affiliate]. A trial version (limited to 15 days) is available. This can be turned into a full version by purchasing a registration key for $14.95 USD. If you're already a registered Palbum owner you can upgrade for just $7.50 USD.

Conclusions
Imageer sets out to deliver simple image management and editing on the Pocket PC. It achieves this with a very simple user experience and no complexity. If you use a digital camera and a Pocket PC then this application should be a part of your travelling toolkit.