I found an excellent tip describing how one can use the (free with recent Macs) GraphicConverter program as very good thumbnail image explorer. I’ve been using PhotoExplorer, from Ulead, both on the PC and the Mac, and while it has all the features I want from such a program, including:
* resizable thumbnails
* variety of sort options
* easy slide show setup
it also suffers from a few problems. mainly in the area of performance. Still, I used it every time I had new images to deal with. (For what it’s worth, the photoshop image browser is useful to me when I know roughly what folder an image is in. For browsing and exploring larger sets of images PhotoExplorer or GraphicConverter work much better.)
GraphicConverter provides a fast, intuitive, explorer like interface (using the fairly new OS X file browsing interface) that displays folders, thumbnails within a selected folder and finally, the selected image.
While it’s a great tool for browsing around your images, sorting and viewing them and so on, GraphicConverter doesn’t serve well as a tool for managing and keeping track of a large number of images. I’ve spent some time looking at Extensis Portfolio and iView Media Pro, both highly regarded image management programs. My initial conclusion is that Media Pro has a much easier to use, more fully featured interface than Portfolio, has better data exporting capabilities and simply put, is a joy to work with!