What is Pixort?

Pixort is a affordable/free tool dedicated to the process of super-efficient reviewing, sorting and culling photographic image files.

Digital workflow: photo overflow!

The entry of high-quality digital cameras has been quite a revolution within photography. Time-consuming and expensive film developing is no longer necessary, and the result can be viewed and manipulated on the photographer’s monitor within seconds. This has clear advantages: it is possible to shoot lots of photos without paying a fortune for film, developing and copying. However, it causes one obvious problem: how do you quickly sort and cull photos? With 50 photos, it’s not a problem, but how about 500 photos after a weekend of mountain hiking? How about 5000 photos from a summer vacation? Obviously, an effective way to sort and cull photos is needed.

Reviewing and comparing heaps of photos becomes a child's play. You don't even have to move your hands away from the keyboard!

Typical digital photography workflow

A digital photographer’s workflow is a question of habit and taste, but all digital photography involves certain inevitable steps: shooting, culling, post-processing and archiving. Consider a typical workflow in a photography assignment (let’s say it’s a wedding):



After the most inevitable part of a photography workflow (the shooting!), the photographer needs to reject unsuccessful shots and sort those remaining (for example, sort the keepers into “ok but not worth printing,” “send to client” and “wedding photo of the year” folders). Displaying and dragging photos into the correct folder in Windows file explorer or in ThumbsPlus is ok for 50 photos, but extremely impractical for 2000 photos!

After the culling, the photographer has 50 remaining candidates to be sent to the client. After some post-processing in his/her favorite post-processing application(s), the 20 photos that turned out to be the best ones after post-processing are archived and organized in an archiving application with names, descriptions, keywords, etc.

Why Pixort was developed

After buying a Canon EOS 10D in May 2003, my photography habits changed dramatically. Earlier I shot 50-100 shots during a summer holiday, now I often shoot 500 during a weekend (and actually that’s not very much compared to professionals!). With this increase in number of photos, culling became a real pain. I tested different tools and realized that all the tools were actually more targeted towards step 3 and 4. I couldn’t find any effective way to compare, reject and sort 500 photos.

To make a long story short: one nice thing about being a programmer is that you can make the tools you want. I needed a “step 2” tool, and thus Pixort was born!

What Pixort is not

Pixort is not an image editing tool, nor will it ever be. It will get some image editing-similar tools like brightness/contrast and levels adjustment, but it is only intended for aiding photo judgment.

Pixort is not a photo archiving/organizing application. There are plenty of excellent tools out there that can do the job very well.

Supported formats

Currently, the following formats are supported. More formats will be supported in the future.

• JPEG (any camera)
• TIFF
• DNG
• Canon raw files
• Nikon raw files
• Fuji raw files
• Olympus raw files
• Minolta raw files
• Pentax raw files
• Kodak raw files

Price

Pixort is pretty cheap - $25 per licence! You may download a 30-day trial version with no feature limitations. Alternatively, you can use the FREE version for non-commercial purposes.