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Interface
Bibble Pro has a very adjustable GUI, though major adjustments are done during installation. At this stage, you will be offered several options concerning the tool palettes mode (floating or docked) or layout (portrait or landscape view). Therefore, it is a good thing to have some picture of your future workflow in mind. I myself prefer the docked tools set, those who work with a two-monitor system would probably prefer the floating one. As for the layout – it depends on the pictures you take: whether most of them have portrait or landscape orientation.
Now to the GUI itself. The program window looks too crowded and bright for me. There are too many pictograms and colors that blur the eye.
The upper panel combines tools that control browser options with some raw conversion tools. The converting tools are set in several panels that can float wherever you like to put them, or are docked on the right. All panels can be minimized and thus free the space. You can even arrange several pallets as tabs of a single one. Additional tools from the basic or advanced set can be called through the menu. And starting from the last release you can save your own tool palettes arrangement.
But still, the interface is a little too overcrowded and it can be easy to lose one’s way in it. And there's an interactive mode on top of all this.
I’ve already said about the confusion with tool panels and WB picker and workflow interference it causes.
I also lost my way not once in assigning a default output format.
Batch converting
Once you edited all the images you can select them all and send to a batch queue. The only thing you will be asked about upon pressing ‘send to batch’ button , is the location of the folder for converted images.
Images can also be sent to a batch queue (right form the thumbnail panel, where the edited images are marked by a little pencil pictogram).
Batch converting in Bibble Pro is a background process, that is you can continue with editing the images (even the one you’ve just sent to batch convert) while conversion is going on. Thus, you can just edit images one by one and send them to batch where they will be processed in their turn while you are busy with other images.
And, of course, there’s an option of applying same conversion settings to a number of images. To use it you should save the settings of the master image and then load them for other images. Or you can add them to a single work queue and apply the settings to it.
But there’s another way, too. And here comes the Bibble’s browser nature. The converter can perform editing operations on all selected thumbnails, right in the browser view mode, without the preview. Moreover, browser mode is not limited to displaying images from a single directory. Bibble's work queues can be defined to provide access to images in multiple directories.
Batch Queues (according to file formats) and Work queues (specified the target). One image can be assigned to several queues. Queues can be duplicated, you can easily remove the file from the queue. Can also add images to a queue one by one and immediately process them or from the queue and them process all the images at once. The processing is going on in the background and does not interfere with further editing.
A thing that embarrasses a bit is the file naming issue. If you are sending an image to process without setting any options for naming and file format the resulted (default) name of the converted image would be – filename[bibblepro] – no extension, as a result no program automatically opening the file. In order to specify file extension you should right-click on a batch queue or open it and choose the needed file format.
Browser options
As a browser Bibble Pro is also extremely flexible. You can adjust the way you browse, see your files representations, and preview.
The File browser is parked together with work, batch and printing queues and due to it the sorting is easier, especially taking into account the capability of putting same image in several different queues. There are three default queues, by the way, but you can add more.
The thumbnails and the preview have to modes – landscape and portrait orientation that you can toggle between. The size of the thumbnails and the accompanying information shown are asjustable, of course. You can freely change the size of the thumbnail and preview section size or completely hide some of them.
And, of course, the images can be rated and tagged, the thumbnails - sorted.
Support
The program is accomponied with an .html based help with a search option. It provides general information well enough but some issues were hard to find. Bibble Labs have also an online learning center with several videos to download, a well structured FAQ, and a support forum of users. All this should ensure a user of timely help with the program.
Installation/Uninstallation
Bibble Pro is an easy to install program, no stubles. Only a few choices to make, but I mentioned the flexibility already.
The uninstall goes smoothly and cleanly with no traces left on the disk
Buying
You can buy Bibble Pro at BibbleLabs site, where it's sold for $169 with a Bibble lite version available for $69.
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