Pixort mini-review

[Scottes]

I just gave Pixort a little try because I saw that I had 6 "temp" directories that needed culling and sorting. Someone here (a few maybe?) mentioned it and I took a look.

I'd definitely say that it's worth looking at for culling and sorting.


When you fire it up you pick a Source directory and up to 5 directories for Ranking (I'll explain in a second). Thumbnails from the Source pop up, and clicking on one brings up a large (but not full-sized) preview image. You can quickly and easily zoom (a little) and pan. Clicking on several images lets you compare them, and zooming/panning one automatically zooms/pans all the others. Very nice feature there.


When you're on an image you can Rank it from 1 to 5. Each ranking corresponds to a Ranking Directory mentioned earlier. When you've ranked all the images you can then Execute The Task List which will either move or copy the images to the appropriate ranking directory.

The idea might be to create 3 directories: 1:Great, 2:Keeper, 3:Delete. To rank an image just click on 1, 2, or 3 on your keyboard. Clicking Execute will move the files to the appropriate directories. You then delete all the images in the Delete directory, ignore the Keeper directory for now, and fire up C1/PS/etc to start processing the images in the Great directory so you can print or post.

That's a nice, quick way to rank and sort and cull.


It's fairly customizable, with various toolbars that dock and float and can be hidden altogether. Thumbs on the side or up top, or bottom or...


Pixort is built for speed. Clicking a number to Rank an image automatically moves you to the next image. Previews are very very fast. Left/right arrow keys rotate, up/down arrow move between images. Zooming or panning is done with the Control key and mouse: Ctrl-LeftButton zooms in or out, and Ctrl-RightButton pans. Again, selecting several images puts them side-by-side and zooming/panning is done for each image. Hotkeys can do almost everything it seems.

In a nutshell, it's fast.


Now for the down side:

It's not a perfect preview since it's not full-sized. Comparing 2 images for ultimate sharpness isn't possible because of this. Both 20D and 10D previews seemed to the same size, and the previews are fast, so I don't know where it's getting the previews from.

I tried ranking a number of images and then Executing. It said it moved the files - it shows a log screen stating this - but it did not move them. Finally I ranked *all* the images in a directory and it did move them all.

It would be nice to delete directly, rather than moving to a directory that requires manual deletion.


They have a free version which doesn't support RAW or TIFF so that's useless to RAW shooters. But the Pro version is only $25 and I'd say that it's well worth it after my initial trial. The download demo is fully-functional for 30 days, so that's plenty of time to test it.

http://www.pixort.com/index.html


I have no affiliation with Pixort in any way, I just think this looks like a nice tool so I thought I'd pass my findings on. Thanks to whoever it was that mentioned it in a recent post here.

[vfilby]

I have used this for some time, I started back when it was completely free and then I was suckered into the non-free version.

It is fast especially when cycling in the forward direction. It maintains a number of images ahead in cache. The behind cache is smaller so you can't backup at light speed.

You might want to consider use the high-quality or low quality raw preview. It defaults to low but be clicking on the gear button on the ranking toolbar it will generate the high quality one.

As far as the zooming it will zoom to 100% which is more than enough to check focus or lens softness. If you have two different sized images I believe it will only zoom to the max amount on the smaller image. It does this because all the zooming/panning is done synchronously on both images when comparing.

Here is the way that I use it. Once I get back from a shoot I go over all the images compare and select the ones that I am going to send as proofs to the editor. I then flag them all as '1' and copy to a working folder. I rarely use the different sort levels but it is handy sometimes. I don't actually delete images, I just select the ones to work on then archive the rest.

[vfilby]

oh yeah, for RAW's it matters for the zoom level to be in low or high quality preview mode. when I load up a raw (mine are from a 300D), it will show the low quality preview as 54% percent of fullsize. Once I flip to high quality it shows it as 27% of full size. The downside is it takes time to generate highquality raw previews.

And it actually does zoom both in to 100% even if the images are different sizes.

[Scottes]

Vince, I had a problem moving files unless I had ranked *all* of them. That is, if I ranked 5 images as "1" and hit Execute nothing happened even though it said that it did. This is with version 1.3.2. Does the same thing happen to you? Or am I doing something wrong?

[vfilby]

Well I always copy, I don't move so that may make a difference. I almost always only use one rank and move them to a new folder (I rename it to something other than tag_1). I just did a test on my latest photo shoot and it works fine.

Here is what I did:

- load up the directory
- selected three images as 1, 2 and 3
- selected copy images
- clicked execute task list with default folder names.

Works for me. I would suggest cheking the error tab on the task execution report (where it tells you what it did). Other than that try emailing the author, he seems to be friendly.

[Scottes]

Thanks Vince. I'll try Copy, and email the developer anyway.

[vfilby]

No problem Scottes,

I hope that your get it working. Personally I love it, it is a great fast review and sort program. I am currently developing another program that lets me input data for images and then export that data to different sources.

This way I can set up a database and search keywords, location or time. I know there are programs that can do this know but they are too big and slow.

I am hoping that my program will compliment pixort in my workflow.

Cheers,