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Pixa for Mac – Organise your images

By: Category: Reviews

You use iPhoto or Aperture to organise your main collection of photos, right? But what about all those other images you have dotted around your Mac which you can never find when you want to? Memes? Reaction images? Screenshots? That’s where Pixa comes in. Pixa for Mac (currently free because it’s in beta), has been designed to be the easiest way to organise your images.

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A designer’s friend

We love making the lives of designers easier here at The Industry. If you take a lot of screenshots, or have a lot of images you need to organise and search, Pixa can be a very useful tool. It’s possible to search for images by colour, size, web address metadata and file extensions to make it as easy as possible to find that pesky screenshot when you need it. Shiny Frog, the developers of Pixa, explain:

Pixa gives you powerful yet easy-to-use tools to grab screenshots and analyze all the images you need.

Projects

It’s simple to create a project and use it as just an album of photos. But Pixa is a lot more powerful than that. Using one of the presets, you can create a new project with a specific template. Screen Shot 2012 06 20 at 00.46.35 Pixa for Mac   Organise your images This is a great way to get kickstarted when starting a new project. For example, when I select iOS icon from the template chooser, the following pixel-perfect template image is added to the project. Now that’s one less thing I need to refer to Apple’s developer documentation for. Screen Shot 2012 06 20 at 00.48.25 750x421 Pixa for Mac   Organise your images Managing versions of images can be a challenge. Not with Pixa. Keeping each version in the app and seeing them organised by date takes the hassle away of figuring out which version is newest — and stops you having to check for tiny subtle changes in each revision. That’s my favourite feature.

Screenshots

Pixa has a dedicated “Screenshots” workflow. Simply press option+command+1,2 or 3 to take screenshots — these will then automatically be added to Pixa’s library for later browsing. As a reviewer of apps, this feature alone has me smitten. No more cluttered desktop! On top of these three main features, Pixa integrates with Dropbox or Cloud.app for the easy sharing of images. Navigate to the image you want, hit the cloud icon and you’re ready to share. This is another great feature for designers or developers looking to share mockups with a team.
If you’re a designer and this sounds appealing, you’re probably not averse to installing some beta software either, right? I’ve been playing with Pixa for a while, now. It’s never crashed on me. It seems stable, with everything working as expected. Having said that, use the app with a touch of caution — make sure you’ve backed your computer up before you start playing around. There aren’t a ton of complex features in Pixa — but it isn’t designed to be a full iPhoto or Aperture replacement. Give Pixa a go today!

  • CJ Melegrito

    Whoa! This is really nice! Pixa is a great idea!