A Plastic Surgery Interactive Surgeon's Corner Software Review

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G & A Imaging's PhotoRecall Deluxe 2.0

Canadian company G & A Imaging here presents a pretty good program especially at the below $50 price point. This program runs with a surprizingly low minimal hardware requirement:

486-66 (Recommends Pentium)
Windows 95/98/NT
16 MB of RAM (Recommends 32 MB)
SVGA Monitor running at 800x600 resolution or better
256 color or greater Video Card (8 bit)

This program has several aspects which are easily adaptable to cataloging for the plastic surgeon. The program can obtain images from your camera, but you would probably be better off placing them in a hard drive directory first. On occasion the program may crash. Any images in memory would be lost in this case. As with any image management program frequent back-ups of the image directory can keep this from being an issue. The program can easily include images in a database if directed to the directory in which they reside.

Once the images are in the database, they can be tagged with a healthy amount of text all of which is keyword searchable. This is really a key feature for the surgeon who will ultimately have thousands of images. A bit annoying is the fact that the program obtains images in chronological order (the order they were taken/originated). When taking follow-up images they will be distant from the pre-operative images. This is easily remedied but takes a little time (cut and paste).

The database I constructed had 450 images and was occasionally slow in scrolling on my Pentium 266 with 64 megabytes of memory. The question of how the database may operate with a heavier image load will be answered in time. The utility program that comes in the package has nice features that repair a database and allow backups (always a good idea). This is the best program I have seen for cataloging images yet.

UPDATE - PhotoRecall 3.0 Beta 10/99

Well it seems that G & A Imaging is looking to improve the program now supplying beta of the new PhotoRecall 3.0 to be released in the next few months. The program has several nice improvements primarily (it seems) due to the database being re-written in MS Access 97. It was formerly in MS Access 95.

The result is a faster scrolling database even when the program in run in the small thumbnail mode (my favorite). My database of 580 patient Jpgs is running better than ever with the upgrade to the beta. The backup files are slightly larger (one eighth) probably due to the increased number of data fields supported.

For those looking to run screen shows, this program supports them better with Midi music and Wav sounds running concurrently. The former program supported one or the other.