Many digital photography hobbyists find that although programs like Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture would greatly improve their workflow, their price tags are are hard to justify. Chris Pirillo tells us about a free, open source alternative: blueMarine.
The blueMarine interface looks alright. There is a thumbnail browser that shows both folders and categories, and a map that plots your geotagged photos on the Earth.
The program does seem a bit confusing, and not as polished as its pricier competitors. After downloading blueMarine, I used the “Browser” pane to open up a folder and… nothing happened. I then used “Target” pane to browse to the same folder and… nothing happened. Unsure of why there were two seemingly identical folder-tree-view panes, and why neither would show me my photos, I ditched the program and went back to Bridge.
Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s OS X — I am running 10.5, while the blueMarine site only mentions 10.4 compatibility. I did get a bad feeling when the installation process asked me to indicate how much memory should be allocated to blueMarine. Sure, I can answer that question, but a lot of others will have no idea what that means. To be fair, blueMarine explicitly states that it is beta software and is not intended for production use.
