Product Reviews

First things first: GraphicConverter's name is too modest. Converting between a large number of formats is far from all it does - it also has a selection of image-editing tools such as red-eye removal. The range of compatible formats is constantly expanding, and it can now import the HD Photo format.

King among the new features is integration with Google Earth, which will appeal to anyone without a GPS-equipped camera. It still requires you to make a record of locations, but once you're at your Mac it's simple to add GPS data. Just select files in GraphicConverter's browser and tell it to take the data from Google Earth's current location. If you're adept at finding locations in Google Earth and recognising them from aerial views, you'll have no trouble. Remote areas may be harder to recognise, but the feature is certainly useful for those in urban areas who perhaps can't justify buying a precise hardware alternative.

On opening GraphicConverter, a dialog appears with a few common tasks as starting points. You can open an image or a browser window, run a slideshow or perform a batch conversion, such as resizing images, tweaking levels and changing colour modes.

Browser windows are an alternative to the Finder for browsing your Mac, with a traditional tree view on

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the left. You can filter files by type or find them with the integrated Spotlight search box. The preview pane shows a histogram of colour distribution, details about the selected file and 100% and scaled-to-fit previews. Dragging a box on the scaled preview lets you inspect areas of the full-scale version closely.

The browser also handles batch conversions for operations such as image resizing and colour-mode conversion. You can perform multiple operations to build more complex conversions.

The drop area along the browser's bottom side simplifies emailing or burning a disc of images, even when they are spread across multiple folders. The list of email clients appears to be fixed, though. There are options for Mail and Entourage, but no generic one for the default mail client.Thunderbird didn't appear in the list despite being installed on our test Mac.

The available tools can't compete with Photoshop's, but the range is solid and includes filled and outline shapes, a stamp tool for cloning areas, a lossless Jpeg-cropping tool and a feature for dealing with the effects of a camera's bad pixels. This version adds a new polygon selection tool, measurement tools and the ability to paste into an alpha channel. It's also affordable.

AppleScript support continues to be extended but, thankfully, the weak-willed among us can fall back on a slowly growing range of Automator actions. We'd like to see more extensive use of Automator as an interface to GraphicConverter so that you don't need to understand AppleScript to integrate it with larger workflows.

Right now, the biggest challenge for GraphicConverter is breaking with legacy and providing a new, more modern presentational layer in the application and through services such as Automator. New features aside, it's still the same capable and competitively priced application it has always been.