Diffractor is an interesting tool for viewing and managing photos, videos and other media files.

Launch the program, and after some initial time spent indexing your files, it displays the results in what looks like a simple thumbnail organiser: preview window on the left, folders and thumbnails on the right, double-click to view something full-screen (or play a video), Esc to return to the normal view and carry on browsing.

A Search bar works much like Explorer. You can click it to display your viewing history, or start typing to display anything with matching file or folder names, even metadata. An Overview screen has canned searches you can use immediately to group files by date, rating, sizes, cameras, albums, artists and more, depending on file type.

Right-clicking an image preview displays its Properties dialog, where you can enter or edit metadata, straighten and crop the image, or adjust vibrance, darks/ midtones/ lights, brightness, contrast and saturation.

Right-clicking a thumbnail reveals various batch processing tools. You're able to run limited conversions, add or remove metadata, rename, rotate, resize, move, copy or print all your selected photos in a single operation, as well as sending them by email or uploading them to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr.

Diffractor is location-aware, too. You're able to sort your media display by location, and it'll organise photos into countries as recorded by their location data. They don't have any? Not a problem, a Google Maps-powered Locate function makes it easy to add your chosen location to any set of photos.