Software Recommendations

Here is a list of software that I personally use and can recommend based on my own experience.

Most of the download links included in this page are external links direct to the software’s site, so let me know if there are any broken links and I will update them.

Photography Related

  • FastStone Image Viewer (External Official Page)
    Lightweight image viewer/browser that can open a majority of image file types (including RAW files by using their embedded JPG), and apart from simple editing and tagging it also includes contact sheet builders too.

  • ImageGlass (External Official Page)
    Image viewing software that I use to replace Windows Photos as the default software to load images. Can be color-managed for wide-gamut displays too. I highly recommend adding ExifGlass to it (together with ExifTool listed below) for viewing detailed Exif data within the software.

  • ExifTool (External Official Page)
    Command line tool to view or edit in depth Exif data of image files. Very useful tool to figure out menu settings or shutter count. Using it with ImageGlass+ExifGlass above gives it a GUI for simpler usage.

General Productivity

  • ClawPDF (External Official Page)
    Simple yet powerful “virtual printer” to create PDFs from documents or images. Various quality settings are available for different use cases, and for purely text-only documents file sizes are kept really small.

  • Musicbee (External Official Page)
    Feature-packed lightweight music player that plays a wide variety of audio files, can access podcasts and web radio stations, and highly customizable (both visually and acoustically). Comes in portable version too which makes a great simple on-the-go player of sorts by placing it on a USB drive.

  • Obsidian (External Official Page)
    A visual editor using markdown language to create notes and link them together. There are many plug-ins available for this software, and how you want to use it to organize or manage your thoughts is pretty much entirely up to you. I personally use it as a note-taking app for observations and learning points, and also as an inventory management app for my equipment.

  • Localsend (External Official Page)
    Cross-platform app for direct peer-to-peer file transfer without passing through a central server. Would work with any devices connected to the same network, and the sending device can set up a temporary local download URL for devices without the app installed to receive/download the files too.

Last Updated: June 2024