15-Minute Reviews :: PixExpose v1.2.1

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on PixExpose version 1.2.1 by Cream Software – An application to create galleries of photos.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Are you no good at image processing? Are you not a specialist in the field of WWW? Or perhaps you are good at both but simply you never have enough time to publish your photos on the web while they wait to be showed to your friends? If any of these is your case, PixExpose has been developed exactly for you! By using the program you will quickly create and publish elegant internet galleries.

Preparing an attractive Internet photo gallery is an extraordinarily easy process – on subsequent program pages you only choose images that are supposed to be the parts of the gallery. You choose a graphic template for your gallery and wait until it is generated. Once it is generated, you can send it to a network server with a single click! PixExpose handles everything!”

Quick Pros

• Relatively easy to use – Odd but comfortable look
• Capability to manually rotate images
• 29 different gallery templates included which all look good
• Gallery settings can be adjusted quickly in-program
• Processing is surprisingly quick

Quick Cons

• Random text in alternate language
• Application should incorporate some photo adjustment tools
• Gallery browser could be easier to use
• Could use a tutorial on creation of own galleries
• No secure FTP

Expansion

Upon your first launch of this application and getting past the About box and the Tips box (Both of which can be dismissed), you are greeted by a simple interface with light styling. The application is in a wizard form, taking you across 7 different steps. While there are next/back buttons at the top (next to the gallery save settings), it was found a lot easier to use the Outlook-style bar down the left side of the window. The steps in creating a gallery are; Start (A welcome message in an alternate language and access to help), Image list, Gallery title and description, Select template, Generate and preview, Save ready gallery, and Publish on the internet. All of the steps are very self explanatory for the most part, though there are no pop-up help bubbles – The tooltips show up in the status bar. The most awkward part of this application at this point is the parts which haven’t been translated from its default language. In some cases, such as the welcome page, it is simply a minor issue; However, in one case I found, it actually means you are guessing what it says to answer a Yes or No question – It is in the dialog box after choosing which directory to retrieve images from. There are a few other locations it crops up as well.

On the Image list page, you can add folders (and sub-folders), as well as choose what file formats to include from the folders. After you have done this, you can then co through and reorder the image, rotate, delete and add more files. There is even drag and drop functionality as well. You can apply a caption to each image as well, which is handy for leaving little comments on each image. What is lacking here however, is any color correction or crop tools; For many people, a second application will be needed to dress up your photos a bit before you come over into this application.

On Gallery title and description, you can put in a title, description, and a list of keywords. The keywords functionality would be handy if you wanted a little more control over the searchability of your images overall. You can also choose your text encoding scheme, but for most you’ll likely leave that one alone.

Select template is fairly detailed overall, though the gallery selector could be better designed – Include a thumbnail gallery of the templates or similar. What is good here, is the fact that you can modify a lot of the settings of the gallery right in the application (such as columns, rows, their size as thumbnails and full size images and so forth), and you can use this as a basis of creating your own theme. While all of the files to create a new theme are straightforward, it would be nice to include a help file or tutorial on the creation of new themes, and maybe an online repository as well where people could share their themes.

The following three pages are based on generating the gallery, saving the gallery, and publishing the gallery to an FTP site. During testing of the application, the galleries generates very fast and resulted in a clean look to the images and the thumbnails. Overall the resulting gallery was good quality, and I was pleased with the results.

On a final note, the FTP support does not offer any secure method of FTP. This will leave many wanting to manually upload your gallery anyways to protect your FTP username and password and ultimately your hosting.

Final Verdict

While the application does need to expand on functionality and correct its translation issues, the resulting galleries were of a good quality. This is a good start with the application, and shows potential if effort is made with it. For free, if you’re looking for a gallery-producing application and not satisfied with freeware alternatives, this one should give you something else to try – If nothing else but for a good theme set. As for paying $29.90, I would hope for the translation issues to be rectified as well as integrate some color correction tools before I would concider recommending it – The “Gallery Software” market is very competitive.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, March 12, 2008