Photon for Mac1.1.5

After upgrading to Mountain Lion, I found that Photon no longer worked, so I emailed the developer. I got a very quick reply, but the news was not good: Photon is no longer under active development, due to a lack of sales. Although a fair decision, I'm still somewhat p****d-off, as I've had asked about updates several times before over the last few years, and was told every time that Photon was still under active development, and that Photon would be updated as soon as he (the developer) could find the time to do so.

I bought Photon shortly after it was released. At the time I thought is was by far the best program to quickly view and sort RAW files. These days, however, I hardly use it anymore. There are other programs out there which do more or less the same, but faster, and, more importantly, development seems to have ground to a halt. Just check the developer's blog, no mention of Photon at all in any of the more current posts. A shame really, as I still feel Photon has a lot of untapped potential. And btw, yes, I have emailed the developer a few times, and always got a swift reply. The promised update(s) have yet to materialize though.

another big fan here. both photon and the response time of the developer are bloody fast. initially the program may look somewhat expensive, until you've used it a couple of times and find that it saves you a lot of time. there's always room for improvement, of course. in my case I'd love to see batch renaming options when exporting, to name but one of my feature-requests. I wouldn't be surprised if this was added any time soon ;-)

Very, very good software...I bouhgt it with the MU discount, but after having used it intensely. I think that even at the full price this soft is worth every $. You will gain, time, convenience and space on your HD... All photographer has to try this soft and put it in his own workflow. Have a nice day. Pat

After trying the demo I can say that this software is excellent at what it does and it does do exactly what the developer claims. The GUI is slick and the program is extremely fast on my Mac Pro. Congrats to the Developer for a fine piece of work. That being said however, I do believe that the program is overpriced for a one trick pony. Perhaps someone indicated to him that a higher price would add value and thus make the program more desirable but in this case I believe that he's overshot the market by at least 100%. While I would definitely purchase Photon for $25 or $30 dollars, $69 just seems high to me and I say that with all due respect because I think the program is very good. In my mind he would be better served to get $30 from "the many" rather than $69 from "the few".

My mind is still boggling at how much time Photon saves me in my photo workflow. If you shoot or work with tons of high-res photos, you probably have a good idea of how valuable time is. And you owe it to yourself to at least demo this app. It's a magic time-making machine. Every day you're not using it is a day you're spending a little more time than you need to be sorting and culling photos. And over the course of a day, week, month, year, the vast quantities of time you save makes the license cost negligible. IMHO.

Very nice update, especially the "recall stacks" function.

$69! For what this software offers, it should be $15.

Otimo :D

Photon has an appealing interface and it does indeed work quickly. However it's overpriced and lacks features of competing software. It's really quite limited. My current tool for photo sorting is PhotoReviewer which is also very fast and, for my needs, better suited to habitual photo sorting where your categories or destinations are well defined in advance. (If only the author could update it to work properly with Leopard it'd be perfect.) I hope Photon continues to evolve. It wouldn't hurt if it could handle video as well since many cameras generate this too. But $49? "Tell him he's dreaming."

I agree wholeheartedly with CHAS_M. $50 is entirely too expensive for a simple image browser. The speed is quite impressive but the price is excessive given the limited functionality.

I think a screen shot bigger than a couple of postage stamps would be really helpful, too.

Have not tried it (yet!), but if all it does is catalog and view your media (even very quickly), $49 is HIGHWAY ROBBERY. Call me when this is $19.99 or less.

I find Shoebox in a different league, down below Photon. Not to say anything bad about Shoebox, I've used it myself a while back. But it is not aimed at the same target user. To me, as a photographer, Photon is more like an alternative to something like Photo Mechanic. I think Photon is blasting-hyper-fast, and will evolve into a really usable tool.

Too expensive for what it does. Few features that go beyond iPhoto... which I feel has the same speed anyway. Personally, I prefer the lite version of Shoebox. Think it's faster too.