Section A.5. iView Media Pro

A.5. iView Media Pro

If you're a Windows user and can't wait for Lightroom because you have to speed up your ranking, winnowing, and filenaming, you can download iView Media Pro's 30-day trial version. I've been using it since I started looking into Lightroom and realized what a bottleneck accurate winnowing could be in the process of establishing an efficient workflow. A friend at a local ASMP meeting showed me this program after I described Lightroom. I immediately downloaded the trial copy, dumped a whole card full of RAW images into its open window and was amazed to see all the thumbnails appear almost instantaneously. You can quickly trash the obvious duds (such as the infamous picture of your feet). To eliminate those images in which the timing or composition is off, you can instantly click a tab to go to a full-screen, full-frame view and see them all by pushing the Page Down key, and press a key combo to trash any near misses. To get rid of any slightly unsharp photos in a series, double-click the first thumb in that series to see it at 100 percent and page up and down through the series, deleting any image that isn't as sharp as its predecessor. There's also a very nice Batch Rename command that works several times faster than doing the same thing in Camera Raw. iView will do much more, but I usually switch over to Camera Raw at that point just because I feel more secure in that environment and because I know I'll be moving on to Lightroom when the time comes.