My major complaint with iPhoto (now that the photo loading is a bit quicker) is it’s inability to mount photo sources such as network shares or various locations on ones hard drive. Importing never gets me excited. There are other things missing, too, but none that really are that a big of deal. While I’ve found other applications that will support photo viewing without importing, none really caught my fancy. That was until I found Picture Arena.

Picture Arena is a product from a German company called IOSPIRIT. An interesting name since IO (or I/O) means “input / output” and in this case, the input is the picture file and the output is what we see on the screen. Anyway, I’m wandering from the true brilliance of my find. Picture Arena not only solved my issue with mounting drives and folders, but talk about speed. Yikes, if iPhoto could only dream of being this fast, millions of Mac users would rejoice. While I have it running on a MacBook Pro, others with slower systems will notice an immediate difference. One user wrote, “The speed on my iMac G4 700 MHz is so much better than iPhoto and it lets me do more things and quicker, too!”

With Photo Arena, you get a wealth of other features such as being able to view and edit the longest list of RAW image files I’ve ever seen. Heck, I dare say it supports more than Adobe Photoshop CS2! All the other basic formats, such as JPEG, are also supported. You’ll be to also resync, as IOSPIRIT calls it, that allows for document management of sorts with your photos. One person will be able to make edits to a picture and send it back to the server updating the server while another person will be able to see those changes automatically. And if you’re a lazy lad, then use your voice as Photo Arena will listen to your commands.

Photo Arena does replicate many of iPhotos features as well. You can make albums, burn CDs, create slide shows (though without iTunes integration), as well as print any selection of pictures. If there is anything you miss of iPhoto, however, it’s always just a click of a button to get it back into an iPhoto album. No worries.

If you’re tired of iPhotos inability to view your pictures off your network, CF card, or just from another source on your hard drive, then you need this application. With its added bonus of other great features, this is simply one very good product that is worth the money. Hey don’t take our word for it, MacGamesandMore made it its pick of the week and said, “It does practically EVERYTHING you need!”

Comments are closed.