How it works

Technically, picurl is an offline photo digest aggregator combined with a metadata translator and storage independent tagging functions. Practically, picurl might be the photo management tool you have been looking for years. But let's see how it works in reality:

Step 1: Define your photo stores

First, you define photo stores in picurl, telling the program where you saved your photos. A photo store can be any device/media or service that saves/hosts your photos. To be more precise, picurl currently supports hard disks, removeable devices and media (USB-stick, mobile hard drives, CD-Rs and DVDs), HTTP and FTP servers plus the photosharing services Flickr and Picasa as stores for your photos.

Step 2: Super-Fast-Indexing

After entering one little shell command, picurl indexes your photo stores. during this process, picurl looks for photos on your stores and saves a miniature version (thumbnail) of each photo to your user directory. picurl only requests a tiny fraction of the actual image data for generating thumbnails, so indexing rather fast in most cases.

Step 3: Metadata translation (done automatically)

This step makes picurl unique: picurl doesn't just write the thumbnail to disk, it also includes the image metadata from the original image. If you index photos from a photosharing service like Flickr, all tags and other flickr metadata are exported to the thumbnail too.

Step 4: Enjoy 1000 possibilities

Now you have a complete, yet minimum-sized offline version of your distributed photo collection... and 1000 possibilies:

  1. Browse your collection in Windows Explorer or IrfanView and right-click'n download the photos you want.
  2. Inspect the contents of ALL your photo stores at a glace with picurl's powerful HTML Interface - you don't need to insert your photo DVDs or connect to the internet for that.
  3. Run powerful, SQL-like Queries on your photo collection to find all images you took on your exciting Barcelona trip with your OLYMPUS 740Z cam.
  4. Send your friend Brian a best-of collection of his portraits within a small zip file - and let him decide what he wants to download.

Questions ???

See our Frequently asked Questions.