BreezeBrowser Pro MiniReview

In the era of digital photography, in the world of zillion pictures taken every day, you need something to browse them fast and delete quickly all that crap. After few years of looking for such a software I came across BreezeBrowser Pro. It's not cheap, because they want 70 USD for it. But nevertheless it's worth every cent for me. Why I'm so excited about this not very popular piece of software? Because like most of good quality stuff it has poor marketing, but product is great. But let's get to the browser itself.

SPEED

First answer yourself a question - how long does it take to you to browse let's say 60 pictures and decide which of them should be removed because of poor technical quality or wrong framing? I do it in about a minute with BBP. And if I only want to view pictures it opens 60 files in about 30 seconds (full screen, CR2 files from 1Dmk3, a little bit automatically corrected for browsing purposes). Can you point out another program that works that fast? You can't do such a thing with Canon DPP (it's not a browser, so you have to click every file one by one) or ZoomBrowser or even Picasa from google! Such an application just doesn't exist - BBP is the only one like that AFAIK.

FEATURES

Do not expect too much from BBP. It's just a simple browser that can help you review files and decide what to keep and what to put into trash. But of course it has some more interesting features. First of all it can show you CR2 file corrected automatically to better rate it (it can be just sharpened with "High Quality" option), black&white version, highlights, focus points (where in the picture focus was achieved) and many more. But what's worth mentioning is that you can see very nice histogram that helps you rate your picture based on it (if full screen CR2 is not enough) and every single CFn set in the camera for specific picture! I do not even mention features like converting files to JPG, rotating them, printing or generating HTML gallery. It's not what is important in this program. Unfortunately I've got version 1.8.1, but I know that newer versions can GeoTag images, compare up to 4 images side by side, correct lens distortion and many more.


SUMMARY

So it's time to summarize this short review. I must say that I like Breeze Browser Pro, because it saves my time and is first step of my workflow. I can quickly decide which pictures to remove to save disk space and which are good enough for further processing. I like very much HQ mode that automatically sharpen image and if picture in this mode is not sharp, you can easily remove it, because you can't help it even with CS5. I definitely recommend BBP to everyone who has a lot of big CR2 files to browse and rate. Just go to BreezeBrowser Pro webpage and download trial version to check it for yourself!