PhoA Advantages and Features

It's definitely obvious that PhoA gives you many benefits when working with the photos, drawings and other highly creative artworks:

• The program does not require installation and (presently) consists of the only file phoa.exe. What does it mean? This means it can be copied along with created photo album file (*.phoa) everywhere you wish. When recording it on a CD-R having place appropriate autorun.inf file to the root of the CD you can demostrate your pictures on any PC by simply inserting the CD in (on PCs keeping autorun feature turned on). The program won't blame you even if it couldn't find phoa.chm file beside, which represents PhoA Help System file.
• The program allows you to build up catalogues (called photo albums) on completely different pictures. Pictures are arranged into groups similar to folders in Windows Explorer. Source images can be almost of any raster format, and also a number of vector formats are supported. Details on supported file formats >>
• Each picture may contain date, place, film and frame number, keywords and description. A thumbnail - shrinked view of a picture - is generated automatically (a number of resampling algorithms implemented). Thumbnail dimensions can be specified in photo album properties, thumbnails themselves are stored in the photo album file; this allows nearly instant photo album opening and viewing. Thumbnails are being compressed with JPEG algorithm and may be cached while viewing.
• PhoA allows momentary photo album searches by picture file name, by date range, place, keywords, description text etc.; search results are displayed as a group-tree node and can be merged with pictures from any group.
• Photo album file holds relative paths to pictures thus allowing to move it anywhere just keeping the photo album file's original relation to pictures. But when photo album file is placed on a different disk or on a network server the album file holds absolute paths and its placement relative to these pictures doesn't matter.
• There's an option for displaying thumbnails' tooltips in the browse mode. Tooltips' content is also adjustable.
• PhoA implements a picture sorting feature for selected group or the whole photo album. Sorting criteria require almost all available data, sorting set may contain arbitrary number of criteria; the last used set is remembered.
• There are views implemented: a brand-new technology for the browse mode. You can classify a heap of pictures into folders with minimum efforts. The only requirement is that pictures' properties are properly filled. These properties are used for grouping pictures in tree folders. Possible grouping conditions are: by picture file path, by date (in various ways), by place, by keywords etc. Groupings may be cascaded, ie may be applied one by one, number of groupings is a matter of sanity. The result of the grouping (folder tree along with their pictures) may be easily put into any photo album group, and after then you can tweak them in usual way.
• PhoA is capable for viewing pictures (in window or full-screen mode) as well as their descriptions. Viewing parameters are adjusted in program settings; there are slideshow mode, picture scaling (zoom in and out with a number of resampling algorithms) and panning with mouse or keyboard. Pictures are being decoded by a parallel thread thus allowing background loading while viewing another picture. Also there's an option for caching the last viewed picture.
• The program supports clipboard operations: you can copy or cut selected pictures into the clipboard and paste them into another group or even another photo album.
• There is fully operational undo system: any wrong operation may be rolled back (the same for group of operations). The undo buffer capacity is specified through PhoA settings.
• PhoA looks good, has pretty suave manner and a handly interface. What else do you need?

For further details refer to the PhoA Help System available on program installation.

Note. Photo album file (.phoa) format is subject to change along with program is being developed. I will make maximum efforts to keep the downward compatibility, ie newer program versions should open (and even save) files of older versions.