ThumbsPlus 5.01 gets the picture

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Manufacturer: Cerious Software
Price: $80
Requirements: Windows, Pentium 100MHz minimum, 32MB memory, 30MB hard drive space
Web Site: WWW.CERIOUS.COM

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THE LAST TIME we looked at Thumbs Plus was years back, when we were working at the Other Plaice, but we've used it since then to help organise our snaps from Computex and the like, and it's outlived several machines in the process. Sadly, we tried to install it on our latest machine but the floppy's suffering from metal fatigue, so we've upgraded to the latest recension, 5.01. Cerious promises an upgrade to this in the near future, which you can read about by clicking on its site.

Features
Basically, this nifty program scans your hard drive and network and when it detects any pictures in a long long list of different file formats, it displays them as little images and then lets you mess around with them.

For example, this screen shot of ThumbsPlus, below, shows a selection of snaps in our INQfile, including that nice Patrick "no jargot here" Moorhead from AMD, a politician inside an Apple - courtesy of Corey, and other shots including the poor woman who saw her car slip into a newly formed lagoon outside her front door.

We like the new look interface, not entirely sure what all the icons do, but there's text alternatives for those who speak iconese. You can turn the iconese off if you don't want to understand yet more ideographs.

All that clutter, and some of it needs organising, doesn't it?

ThumbsPlus lets you delete files, move them around through a tree structure, create contact sheets, and there's even a Web Page wizard so you can create Interweb contact sheets too.

You can batch process your files and the formatting features in this program are pretty good too.

The program supports a long list of image files, and so far we haven't noticed if it fails to recognise any of the more obscure ones from yesteryear.

Of course, this program is not a Photoshop or a Paint Shop Pro - editing your picture files is a different kettle of fish - but for finding, categorising and otherwise organising your pictures, we think it's very hard to beat.

As well as these formidable abilities, ThumbsPlus can do other stuff like create galleries, scan images in, and even lets you search for images, keeps a record of offline CD-ROMs and other drives, and in general acts like an excellent factotum.

ThumbsPlus offers individual and site licences for its software, and you can download it for thirty days and try it out before you dish the dosh, as we Brits say.

I like the new one a lot. Thoroughly recommended if you need to keep track of multiple images. µ