[tweetmeme] You’ve used iPhoto to sort through your personal pics, manage professional shots in Aperture, Navigate through stock photography in Bridge, and keep screenshots in a folder on your hard drive. And then some. So far things are going along perfectly, and that’s fine. But when it comes to software, there’s always someone who has a brighter idea about doing something, that makes you feel like you’ve been wasting your time all along. This app may not be one of those bright ideas, but it’s certainly cool enough to write about.

Deep from Ironic Software, is an image management app like no other. Rather than depend on meta data to search for images, Deep catalogs images based on natural criteria like colour and size, and mixes those up with any meta data it can find, such as location, tags, or ratings. All of this presented in a slick clickety click interface that doesn’t take more than 3.5 seconds to understand. You can then preview any of the images in the selection preview tab, go full screen, use a ‘Genius’ feature to bring up similar images, and finally open them up in Photoshop. I would have liked to have seen some more advanced search criteria like sharpness, contrast, or even camera settings like Aperture and speed, but I suppose simplicity rules.

All this is well and good, but does it really work? I’m not quite sure. I’ve had the app installed for a couple of months now, and every now and then I launch it just to see if I can find a particular stock image that I could use. On searching however I felt totally lost. I clicked around the colours, and technically they sure did bring up the correct results, but they weren’t the images I wanted. Same for the ‘genius’ feature. Perhaps I wasn’t persistent enough, and maybe I needed to have more image tags in place.

But it’s a beautiful app, and the swirly thumbnail browser will surely go well with Coverflow fans. I’d recommend you download it and give it a try, but I don’t think it has any real world uses. And for $35 for a license, no thanks. That said, if you have been using Deep ‘for realz’, do sound off in the comments.