While our photo and image collections grow exponentially and take up a significant portion of our storage space, we tend to forget the importance of keeping that massive amount of image files conveniently organized. Tonfotos is a free (while in beta) image manager and organizer that will help you find and retrieve images in no time and browse your photo collections in an innovative and useful way.
When it comes to importing images to Tonfotos, the program works with libraries. You can select as many libraries (i.e., folders, internal and external disks, cameras, smartphones, etc.) as you wish, and the program will scan the selected destinations for images. Once the scan process has finished (it may take longer than expected depending on the number of files, folders, and subfolders), your photos and other images will be then presented by folder in the Folders tab, but that’s not the only way you can view them using Tonfotos.
Actually, one of the main assets of this tool is the fact that you can browse your photos by date and by location. The Events tab will display all your folders in a timeline ordered by year, while the Locations tab will use the geo-localization information stored in the image itself to place it conveniently on a world map.
Another interesting utility is its image viewer. Apart from the standard window displaying the photo selected in all its glory, the program can create an animated presentation on the fly of all the images in the active folder. Despite you can’t modify, customize, or enhance (i.e., with different transitions) the way the program produces these animated presentations, they’re a novel way of displaying your images. Too bad that they can’t be saved to disk for distribution among friends and family.
Some more “standard” features include a duplicate file finder and remover to free up space and avoid confusion and an export function to convert your images into WebM, JPEG, and PNG files. Finally, another feature worth noting that you won’t find in many other image managers, is the face recognition function. This feature is extremely useful to tag your images with the names of the persons appearing in it, which will allow you to find and classify photos by person name.
Tonfotos is still at beta stage, which means that there’s still room for improvement. I must admit that, when reviewing this tool, I regretted the lack of a simple editing functionality, but I’m happy to see that this feature is already on the list of to-do things for future versions. Still, this free utility comes with a set of innovative and interesting utilities that you won’t find in some well-known paid software tools. This is not only a tool well worth trying, but also a tool to keep an eye on for future developments.
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