Graphics and design
Pixave
YoungHo Kim
About
When working with a large number of images, the question arises of organizing and viewing them efficiently. This is important for those who are involved in design, decoration, and just people who love when everything is laid out on the shelves. This is precisely why the Pixave image manager was created, in which it is not only convenient to store and view pictures, but also sort them, edit them, export them to various formats and perform some additional operations.
Pixave has a convenient three-pane interface that is familiar to all OS X users. On the left is a sidebar containing all the collections and folders in your library. Images are included in standard collections automatically - the application sorts them by content type, separating wallpapers from screenshots, and icons from animation. Beauty!
Import is carried out by simply dragging and dropping images onto the sidebar or into a mini-widget into which you can collapse the main window, conveniently placing it in any part of the screen.
You can create simple and smart collections (by setting certain parameters), as well as folders where you can conveniently put similar content. Smart Collections offers a variety of filters, including file type, size, resolution, color, and more.
Press “Space” or double-click and get into viewing mode. On the right side panel various information about the file is displayed, here you can also add a comment to it, assign a tag or rating. Basic image editing using annotations is available. You will have tools from “View” at your disposal, that is, selection, arrows, text, signature, etc. There are also several different filters that you can create combinations of.
But, as you understand, image editing is far from Pixave’s main strength; the application is “tailored” for convenient sorting and organization. For this, in addition to automatic distribution by content type in standard collections, there are tags (as in Finder) and a type of cataloging such as “Colors”. It is included in the sidebar tab with a drop icon. Its essence is as follows: the application analyzes the colors in all photos in the library and groups them by shade. In this case, you can set several parameters. Quite a convenient thing if you need, say, to choose pictures that match each other in color.
Among the additional features of Pixave, it is worth noting export to various formats, as well as sharing images on Facebook, Twitter, Mail, and so on. You can export pictures to a PDF document or even create a book in ePub, which you can then view on your iPad.
In addition, the application has a browser with which you can take screenshots of website pages. This is very convenient because the entire page is captured, and not just what fits on the screen. Of course, you can take regular screenshots of the screen or windows, which will be saved to the Pixave library for further work with them.
The application settings contain various display options, export quality settings, hotkeys and notifications. Everything here is simple and clear.
Overall, Pixave is a fairly functional application that solves a number of problems, and includes additional tools such as creating ePub books from your images or taking screenshots of web pages. Only those who really tinker with pictures a lot and keep a large collection on their hard drive can appreciate its real benefits.