Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003

Image in a Hurry: A Great iPhoto Companion

Sometimes you need an image in a hurry -- to email to someone, for example, or to include in a document that you're creating. And if you have a huge iPhoto library, launching iPhoto can just take too long.

A US$12 shareware utility, James Sentman's Image in a Hurry, is an ideal program for occasions like these. It's like adding an express elevator to your iPhoto library -- locating and exporting images can be much faster with Image in a Hurry than with iPhoto.

Image in a Hurry sports a simple, one-window design. The left half of the window shows images from your iPhoto library -- complete with titles and comments, if you've been smart enough to assign them. (See pages 72-75 of The Macintosh iLife for details on titles and comments.)

A pop-up menu lists your iPhoto albums: choose an album, and its photos appear. From here, you can select photos and add them to Image in a Hurry's Export list, located on the right side of the program's window.

Exporting is Image in a Hurry's specialty: the program can export JPEG images in a variety of quality settings, which you can customize. You can also resize photos by typing a value in the Percent Size box. You can even resize photos so that they're larger than the originals, though doing so will introduce image artifacts.

Image in a Hurry lives up to its name. When you want to quickly locate and export an image, it's faster than using iPhoto. I'd like to see support for iPhoto search keywords added to a future version, and I'd like to have the option to resize the program's window. But these are minor complaints. Image in a Hurry is lean and mean and does its job well. And it's packed with keyboard shortcuts that power users will appreciate.

Image in a Hurry: recommended.

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