Return of the Photo Viewer

I’ve long enjoyed using resco’s file explorer and photo view on my devices. After the file explorer was updated and the photo viewer was not, I thought all was lost. Well, good news, photo viewer is alive and kicking, and it is looking better than ever! Even for an alpha.

The view that greets you after the program launches is well thought out. It’s a somewhat different layout to some of the modern day photo apps like kinoma and htc album, but it works. I actually prefer this view.

The “my documents” view is fine in theory, but most people would keep their pics on their cards (I hope they do) to keep the device nice and clean. The “camera roll” view is spot on. Does what you’d think it does, it knows where the pictures taken from your device’s camera are stored and displays them in this category. The “favorite” view is used to display items you set as favorite. You can select any folder of pics from any location and set as favorite, great for folders you access often. The “my album” view is not available as yet, I am anxious to know what this is! I’d also like to see an option to remove a category I do not want on the home page.

So let’s take a look at the camera roll view. After selected, you’ll be taken to a grid layout of all the pictures taken with your devices camera.

At the bottom of the screen we have some menu buttons. “home” which takes you back to the home page you get when the app is first launched. “up” which just takes you back one level in the current folder. “actions” and “menu.”

The action button allows you to select multiple items at once for…well…some sort of action.

After you’ve selected your images, you’d hit the big green action button and a host of actions (there is that word again) appear.

In “send to” you can send your selected images via infra-red, Bluetooth, email or MMS. “upload to” allows you to upload to either facebook or flickr. I was especially pleased with the upload to facebook option, as I seem to be addicted to that site these days. Here is how an uploaded picture is published to facebook.

Notice the “resco mobile photos,” always nice to advertise for free 😉

I hope resco considers adding an upload to twitter option in the future builds. The rest of your actions are pretty standard, copy to folder, move to folder, rename and delete.

You can also access these actions and a few more by selecting a single image, which is done by clicking and holding on the image.

Notice the properties option. There is a surprising amount of detail offered in the property option.

In the “menu” option at the bottom of the screen, you’ll have “create album,” “slide show,” “sort,” and “options.”

Within Settings, you’ll find a host of options to add even more of an experience to the app as you so choose. With all these available options and tweaks, there is no doubt this program is all about heavy usage.

So what about actually viewing a picture? Well, let’s take a look.

The image on the left is what you see when you first select your image. If you tap one more time, you’ll be greeted with the advance menu seen on the image to the right. Here you can rotate, send to, zoom in and out, start a slide show (the play button) and one other feature that has yet to be implemented. I assume the unassigned feature button will be for the advance editing features photo viewer has been known for in the past.

You can find the cab install here: http://www.resco.net/downloads/pocketpc/viewer/en/PhotoViewerALPHA_p.ARM.CAB

Photo Viewer is shaping up to be the premium all we all loved it for. It has replaced kinoma as my default photo viewer for now. I recommend you all take a look at it.