When I first saw the name of the product, I wondered if there was any relationship to Firehand Technologies which is a local company (7757 S. Jamestown Ave. Tulsa, OK 74136) that has two products: Ember (The image viewer, editor, and organizer for Windows) and Lightning (The photo display and distribution system for Windows). I have used Ember as one of my primary photo programs since November 1999 when the owner of Firehand Technologies, Warren Smith, demonstrated it at a TCS Special Projects meeting. But there does not appear to be any connection between the two companies.

Click photo to enlarge
Firegraphic	Firehand Ember

Firegraphic is a 6.39 meg download:

And it is very easy to install. When installing Firegraphic you are presented with several configuration options. You can select any or all of the supported graphic types as file types to be automatically associated with Firegraphic

If you do not authorize a particular graphic file type to be associated with Firegraphic during install, don't worry, because you can always go to Options and associate or disassociate any graphic format file.

You are also given the ability to put an icon for Firegraphic in your tray, your Start Menu, on your Desktop, or in your Quick Launch bar.

As was the case with file associations, you can always put those shortcut icons in the various locations later, using the Options menu.

This is what the main Firegraphic screen looks like. Notice as you move the mouse over folders other than the current folder, it displays a sample of the graphic files in that folder. In this example Main Gallery is selected, so most of the files are from it, but with the mouse over Clip Art the popup shows four files from that folder.

The file Astronault.jpg is the selected file in Main Gallery, and in the lower left corner you can see it's properties.

Clicking the down triangle in the right side of the Folders box gives you a flyout with a number of functions you can perform.

Clicking the down triangle in the right side of the Properties box gives you a flyout with functions you can select.

Selecting Show Preview means that the Properties box will contain both a preview of the selected image AND it's properties. Selecting Hide Preview means the Properties box will just contain an image's properties.

If you right click an image, you will get a pop up Properties window which shows the image, it's name, it's properties, AND allows you to enter the Artist's name, a Description of the image, and Keywords.

All of this image will be displayed in the Property Box

You can do an Edit, Find (or Ctrl F), and search for Keyword(s), Artist, or Name. Remember we assigned a description of "Bridge in Australia" to the image "Australia.jpg" and Keywords "Bridge Australia" to the image.

Searching for "Bridge", both as Name and Keyword, does not find anything. Searching for the keyword "Bridge Australia" does find the image. Apparently with keyword you must match it exactly.

Searching for Name "Australia" also finds the image, and searching for the Name "Aust" also finds the image.

In a different folder I assigned the keyword "bio" to the images of two men, and the keyword "bio ladies" to the images of three ladies. A search on Keyword "bio" just selects the two men

A search on Keyword "ladies" does not find anything, but a search on Keyword "bio ladies" selects the three ladies. So I conclude that you can do a search on a part of a Name, but you must match Keywords exactly.

I wonder where it keeps the information. I did not see any file in the folder with images where it might keep information on the images, and I did not see any file in the Program Files folder which might contain that information.

You can control the folder that Firegraphic initially opens up, when you start it:

I agree with Don Greer, Firegraphic is an interesting program. One thing I found confusing is that when it lists files, it does not do it in an alphabetical order, and it also is not in file size order, or date/time created order. I just don't know what order it is, but in writing this article, I used Firehand Ember to show my screen captures, because it gave me the images in a predictable order.

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