Pentaware PentaSuite Pro ver. 8.5.1.234

PentaSuite-Pro 8.0 is a suite of file-management tools that puts a heavy focus on digital photography functions. (There’s a frame grabber, photo album creator, and more.) The suite’s relatively steep price and avalanche of features reflects this emphasis. To access the features, a PentaWare Manager displays all the suite’s apps in a window. You can also right-click files to access PentaSuite’s options.

You can use the suite’s 17 apps individually, but the greatest benefit seems to come from combining them. For example, PentaBrowser lets you search for a file and view a thumbnail of its contents, whether it’s a graphic, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation. Double-clicking a graphic loads it in PentaView, which has basic graphics editing tools. PentaView isn’t a Photoshop replacement, but it does provide quick, simple fixes and enhancements. If you double-click a nongraphics file, such as a Word document, PentaView displays the contents and lets you change some characteristics (bold, italics, etc.), but you can’t edit it.

From within PentaView you can print, encrypt, compress, convert to a PDF file, send (via email or FTP), and burn a file to CD/DVD using other PentaSuite apps. Digital photographers should find the batch-file renaming feature especially useful.

PentaSuite’s real power comes from its tools for managing, organizing, and sending files of all types. Anything you can do manually, you can do automatically via the scheduling feature. For example, you can compress backup files and send them via FTP to an off-site location at midnight every day or load images from your digicam and automatically rename them while burning a PDF file of your images to a CD/DVD simultaneously.

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