GraphicConverter is many things: a poor man's Photoshop replacement, a versatile photo organizer with IPTC and EXIF tagging support, an excellent way to present a slide show, a robust photo editor, a batch processor, and an image format converter. The software has been around for many years and pre-dates OS X although it is frequently updated and now a universal binary. GraphicConverter can open files in nearly 200 formats and export in nearly 100. It is also available in twelve languages!
Since Photoshop is a bit of a beast and takes its time launching, you may find yourself using GraphicConverter for typical Photoshop tasks such as cropping, resizing, alpha layers, and basic photo corrections. GraphicConverter launches in a snap and is ready to do your bidding. The batch change feature is quite powerful (although the interface is antiquated) and makes short work of entire folders of images. It's easy to use for tasks such as creating thumbnails with different titles or file formats and is used extensively for the images which end up on this web page.
GraphicConverter may be used indefinitely with a short startup delay, however, it's well worth paying the small fee to support this fine software. The developer is also unusually responsive; if you find problems or have reasonable feature requests, he will often fix or implement them within weeks or months - quite different from the experience you'd get contacting Adobe.
The only real drawback of GraphicConverter is the sometimes obtuse user interface, portions of which (batch processing, etc.) haven't changed much since the early nineties. GraphicConverter also suffers a bit from "featureitis" and it can sometimes be difficult to find a desired feature or figure out how to set the preferences to achieve the desired goal. Still, the program is affordable, robust, fast, and hard to do without. It's a venerable workhorse and is sure to find a place in your workflow!
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