RoboImport Editor's Review

RoboImport is an utility for importing images from your digital camera, or from a memory card, allowing you to batch rename the files and make some edits, before they are transfered to your computer.

You can set these options first, and the program will apply them to all the images you want to download from your camera. You can:
- choose the destination folder, where the images will be saved.
- set the default printing resolution for all your images to 300 DPI. Many digital cameras have the default printing resolution set to 72 DPI.
- auto rotate JPG files.
- convert RAW to Adobe DNG format. A RAW image it's not compressed, and it contains all the pixel information captured by the camera's sensor, so you have complete control over the temperature adjustments (for white-balance), tint, hue, and exposure. Unfortunately, there is no common standard format for RAW image files. Each camera manufacturer has its own proprietary RAW file format. The DNG (Digital Negative) specification was conceived and developed with the intent of eliminating this problem, by becoming a standard format for long-term storage and archiving of digital photographs.
- check for duplicate files.
- batch rename photos.
- mark files as read-only, so they cannot be deleted accidentally.
RoboImport allows you to transfer the RAW files to folders separately from JPEG files.

After the transfer, you can allow the program to delete the source files, open the appropriate application to view the photos, automatically copyright your photos by filling in the IPTC annotation, choose a back-up directory, enable GPS tagging. IPTC is an international standard of embedding and reading “metadata” information such as caption, creator, location, date, etc. for archives, libraries and other organizations. The EXIF metadata that camera adds to images will be saved during the transfer.
RoboImport supports reading of EXIF data from RAW files of such cameras as Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Fuji, Olympus, Sigma, Pentax, etc.

Pluses: It has nice features for managing photos.

Drawbacks / flaws: It has no image editing capabilities.

In conclusion: Camera manufacturers offer bundle software for viewing, transferring and editing photos, but if you are not satisfied with what comes with your camera, you can consider RoboImport as an alternative. Anyway, if you need professional software for processing RAW files, you may want to check out Capture One.

version reviewed: 1.1.0.58