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Provides: Contact Sheets of your images
Developer: Lorenzo Puleo
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.8 and 4 MB of storage (the application size).
Retail Price: New: $24.99
DiapoSheet (available from Apple's App Store) creates contact sheets of your images. It has a host of features for a new application (currently at v. 1.1) and does a very good job of providing the functions it intends to. It is relatively easy to manipulate, customize, and fine-tune to your needs. While a bit more pricey than one may wish, it is worth the money.
Let me first start this review talking about Adobe's Creative Cloud. If you've started with Adobe's CC by now, and you've been working with Bridge CC, you might have noticed that there are some things missing: AOM, Adobe's Output Manager and the Export Panel. I've been told that AOM should reappear some time in the future, while the future for the Export Panel is seriously in doubt. Regardless, the AOM is gone now and we really do not know when it will return or in what form it might reappear. If you are unaware, the Adobe Output Manager let you select images in Bridge and create PDFs of the images and/or a Web Gallery of the selected images. Unfortunately, despite the fact that AOM had been in Bridge for a number of years, it had shown almost no growth or development. So even if AOM does reappear in the future, you might consider looking into DiapoSheet to fill in the hole that currently exists for PDF creation. In addition, DiapoSheet is already significantly more capable than what we had with AOM in Bridge-CS6.
The name DiapoSheet comes from diapositive + sheet which is kind of strange/interesting name because a diapositive is an image on a transparent material (think of a slide or film). I suppose in this case, the transparent material is the electrons. (?) But I continue:
When you first start up DiapoSheet, you are presented with a Panel of controls and a blank "Sheet" as seen below. You can adjust the presentation size of the sheet's view (by a slider on the very bottom right) to display an entire page, the view of an individual cell was too small to see from this screenshot, so I added a cropped view of a single cell region superimposed on the whole screenshot. Because I do not have any image on this page, default information is added to the selected metadata of the images. More on this later.
Much of the controls of DiapoSheet are either fairly obvious or ripe for experimentation. Nonetheless, a valid manual would have been welcome. The website does provide a lot of information, but certain features and/or dynamics are not necessarily obvious.
As explained within each cell, you can simply drag your images onto the page and see the content fill into the cells. You can drag most image formats: raw, DNG, jpeg, tif, psd, etc. I did have some strange anomalies in that if I dragged an image format from the Finder, sometimes that format would not show up in DiapoSheet and then other times that same format showed up just fine. I could not find the trigger that caused this occurrence.
Note that if you drag a single image, it will show up "ON" the page (as opposed to within a cell) and can be resized and placed anywhere. Thus, if you have a company logo, it's easy to place it on your pages. If you want to add images to the cells, you need to drag two or more at a time.
One of the biggest limitations I found was that once you populate the cells, you cannot remove any of the images: you have to place only the images you want. In addition, if you've placed 4 images and want to add four more, the 2nd group of four will replace the initial four. Simply, you have to place the images you want, no more and no less.
You can place more images than you have cells for and these will populate to extra pages. If you have your grid set to nine images, and you place 20 images, you will have three pages of images. (You scroll your pages with the arrows and slider on the bottom left side of the DiapoSheet page.) The images populate the page by alphabetical order and both portrait and landscape are dealt with the same. There is a pair of radio buttons, halfway down on the Panel, that lets you set the image to either Fill or Fit to accommodate the space available.
There is room for as much metadata as you'd want to present until there is no more room. Part of the problem is because each metadata item occupies it's own line. There is no way to have the metadata chain together and wrap the space. As such there can be a lot of wasted space if you want a lot of metadata to show. The metadata that DiapoSheet lets you turn on or off is shown below.
If you look at the added "Help Guide" in the Metadata sheet above, you'd be forgiven if you thought that when the guide says: (4th instruction): Click on a cell to select it" that it refers to a cell on the page. No, rather it refers to the cells in that Metadata sheet. Once you understand that clicking on a cell in that sheet is what is being referenced here. That is, you control the font, size, etc. of the metadata on the page by changes you make while the metadata sheet is visible. And yes, you can Select All (Command-a) or you can also Shift-click or Command-click (for discontinuous selection). Cell selection is shown below.
The one big option currently missing is any ability to provide custom metadata, specifically a "Comment" field.
For protection of your images, a Watermark option is available. This places an image of your name or logo over the image and can be placed at any location across the image you want. To make this watermark, I created it in Illustrator, resized the artboard to fit the object, then saved it out as a PNG. The one primary limitation with this is that the watermark can only be in one location across all of your images. Thus, if the watermark doesn't appear in an image due to the color and/or content of the image at that location, well, that's it.
If you look at the very top image, in the Toolbar, you can see an icon for "Text." If you click on this, a text box will appear that you can edit. There is a surprising amount of Text control for an application as focused as DiapoSheet. From Kerning to super-sub-scripting, DiapoSheet has it there.
Similarly for paragraph control, DiapoSheet also has a wide variety of options.
All that notwithstanding, one of the biggest limitations with all of this power is that using them is a pain: there are very few key-commands for the subtle options so that if you kern and wish to kern again, you need to keep attacking the dropdown menu system. That gets old depending on how tight you want to be.
Lastly are the Tokens. By leaving your cursor in the text (mentioned above) you can go to the menu and from Format, select Tokens as shown below.
While editing the text, the Tokens show what they are and once you click off to the side, the intent of the tokens are displayed as shown below.
Notice that last Token is "Document Title." This will be the name of the DiapoSheet's document name once saved. The annoying thing is that the suffix provided for a DiapoSheet document is ".layo." Thus, your "document" name will show up as "Mr. & Mrs. Smith's Wedding Photos.layo." (Although there's nothing stopping you from simply typing out whatever you want and leave out the "Document" token altogether, but it does make using the token somewhat limited.)
Once completed, you can save the pages out as PDF, JPG, TIFF or PNG. You can change the resolution from 300 dpi to 72 (or Monitor resolution). You can also change the quality of the document from Poor to Best with a sliding scale.
While you can't save out a specific setup, you can easily alter any saved document. (Remember, adding new images only replaces any existing images, not adding to them.) So, for example, you can save out a document called Vacations with all of the settings you'd like to have, copy that, and use that as a template for your future vacations. There is no "Save As…" option so you have to be careful about what you are saving and where.
In Short
In short, DiapoSheet is not only a good replacement for the PDF part of the missing AOM, but is a good alternative to the PDF part of AOM. If you do not use Adobe applications and/or did not use AOM from Bridge, than comparison's are obviously meaningless and using DiapoSheet will be a pleasure in itself. That, despite some annoying limitations such as no way to comment on an image, no way to have the metadata, be continuous and wrap across lines. In fact, it would be even better if we could group the metadata into a wrapping section and a non-wrapping section. Think of Name metadata not wrapping and camera settings wrapping. It would also be a big asset to not have suffixes be displayed for either image names and/or Document name. While I do appreciate the fine control for text provided, some mechanism other than accessing the dropdown menus would be very welcomed.
For a new application to have as many features as DiapoSheet has is pleasant and surprising. I do look forward to watching this application develop. (And I do think a detailed PDF Help file (with screenshots) is called for.)
