Adobe Photoshop Album

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Innovative Product
Review: The organizational method of tagging picture(s) with as many or as few tags as you'd like is the perfect way to organize thousands of photos. There just isn't anything else out there that is up to the task. Anyone who says differently either hasn't tried it, or just doesn't understand the concept.

True, PSA is a 1.0, consumer product, so there are some things that could be improved and strengthened to a higher (professional) level... I strongly agree that the default categories should be changeable/removeable, but in all honestly, the people, places, events and other categories are right on the money for what most people need starting out. Given Adobe's track record, I'm sure that any problems will be solved in time. (Compare Photoshop 1.0 to the current version)

In the mean time, it does everything I need and more. Besides tagging, I also love the calendar view, photo-book creations (orderable online directly through PSA) and the tight integration with Photoshop 7 and Elements 2. Three cheers for Adobe Photoshop Album!!!

Rating:
Summary: The Good and the Not So Good
Review: The Good: A great way to organize photos. I have more than 5000 photos cataloged, a combination of scanned pictures, and photos taken with a digital camera. Also, the software is very quick and quite good at fixing minor photo problems such as lighting and color (and red eye). Almost all my scanned photos were greatly improved by using these one-click adjustments. For image retouching and more advanced editing, the software allows you to easily link to other software you may have such as PhotoShop or PS Elements.

The Not So Good: Do not try to restructure your photos and their respective directories after importing and cataloging your photos using Album -- it's a pain to re-link the images. Also, thumbnails get out of sync and it can become confusing. Another disappointment is the software's ability to create video slide shows for DVD players. Very few options -- you cannot choose more than one piece of music, and if you want "high quality" images, you cannot have any music or transitions. There also does not appear to be a way to determine how many images you can place on a CD. When I place a hundred or so images in a slide show, I seem to be okay. But when I tried to place 280 in a slide show, I received a write error during the burn process. I would like to see the slide show features significantly beefed up in future versions.

Bottom line is I have now become dependent on the software for finding photos quickly, and at this, it does a very good job. With more robust options for creating video slide shows, it would be a great product.

Rating:
Summary: Annoying program to work with
Review: There are two annoying aspects of this software that prevent me from recommending it:

First, it uses a great deal of system memory - more than any other program on my computer. The program often freezes as a result. Even when it doesn't, it can be maddeningly slow.

Second, the way the tags are laid out, it's very easy to accidentally check a tag box while dragging that tag onto a photo. Result - the group of photos you're working on disappears, as the program executes a search on that tag. Very annoying and time consuming. This happened to me so often that I can't believe it wasn't caught in the development process.

In short, this program is less than what it should be, and definitely not what I needed to organize my photo collection.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous software for managing digital images
Review: Adobe Photoshop Album is, in a word, fabulous. First it helps you in finding all your photos. A Photoshop Album catalog can, according to the included Readme document, contain up to 50,000 images (if you need to catalog more pictures, my hat is off to you -- but don't worry as you can create multiple catalogs). You can tell it to simply scan an entire drive for images, or you can use the enhanced routines to collect photos from your hard disk, digital camera, scanner, or CD.

Once Adobe Photoshop Album knows where your pictures are, you can begin cataloging them. Adobe's software engineers have made a forward leap in "ease of use" by converting a sophisticated keyword database into a simple drag and drop tagging system. The tags are simple (and dare I say fun?) to make. Once built, they can be effortlessly drag-and-dropped into one or many photos. Images can have as many tags as you need. Since the tags use tiny photo-image icons (that you can select and edit -- hence the 'fun') you can see at a glance which one you're looking for. The tagging system is cool to use and very functional.

After an image is tagged and dated, finding pictures becomes a dream come true. Want to seek out pictures of a person? Just click the box by their tag. Want to find all the pictures of your kids at grandma's house? Assuming you've created and added the right tags, just click-click. Want to find all the pictures taken during the week of a vacation? Just use the on-screen timeline, or even a very-familiar looking calendar interface. (The fact that the calendar interface looks like a nice wall calendar is indicative of how much work Adobe's team put into the user interface).

Although it shines at digital image cataloging, the software fell a bit short when it was time to catalog my collection of scanned images. There are no tags or shortcuts for dating photos. Since I wanted to change the picture's catalog date from the file date (i.e, when I scanned it) to the actual date (when it was taken), I had to go through a fairly cumbersome series of mouse clicks. Some of the super-usability shown in the tagging system could have gone into dating photos.

Adobe Photoshop Album includes a decent set of editing tools. You can select a variety of "one click fixes" to sharpen the image or adjust levels. There are other tools for more controlled adjustments, such as brightness and contrast sliders, and hue and saturation sliders. I will say these basic tools are very well implemented, and you can make a basic fix -- say, crop, brighten and sharpen -- extremely quickly. If you need more fine control, Adobe Photoshop Album works well with Adobe Photoshop Elements (and, I am sure, Photoshop itself). I presume it can be set to work with other photo editors.

Beyond cataloging, Photoshop Album offers a set of tools to share the images through email, slideshows, photo albums. The email option works only with Hotmail and Outlook Express, which is unfortunate for Netscape, Mozilla and Eudora users. It can even burn video CDs. As well as printing your photos, it will help you create and print greeting cards and calendars as well. Finally you can share photos using something called Adobe Atmosphere Gallery. The last is an impressive, if rather bizarre, tool to put your images up on the virtual walls of a virtual 3-D gallery.

Adobe Photoshop album offers an easy link to printing your photos through an online service. However, although right now the only service the program offers me is Shutterfly. Since I use Ofoto, I'll go ahead and keep uploading photos the old-fashioned way.

Adobe Photoshop album will back up your photos onto CD-R, CD-RW or DVD, which is probably good for people who don't otherwise back up their photo collection. In fact, given it's ability to work with digital cameras and scanners, email and the Web, your printer and online printing services, and CDs and DVD's, Adobe Photoshop Album could honestly be the only photo software you need. Users who want greater editing resources will need a more powerful imaging program, but this software can certainly do everything else.

If possible, I probably would have given Adobe Photoshop Album four and a half stars. With a large collection of scanned family photos, dating them for inclusion in the catalog is an unnecessarily tedious chore. However, the software is exceptional in all other respects and I was happy to round up instead of down. A fine, fine program.

Rating:
Summary: Finally, an excellent way to manage my photos.
Review: Flipping through the reviews of this program I've seen a lot of negative reviews so I was compelled to write a positive one detailing my experiences with it.

First of all, I've snapped a lot of photos with my digital camera, and I was always losing track of where I was placing them on my hard drive. Every time I took a trip or had a collection of photos, I'd download them from my camera into a separate folder on my hard drive. Soon I had poorly labeled folders of pictures all over my desktop and in various drives on my computer, it was so hard to keep track. With this software, I can dump all my photos into one folder and forget about renaming each photo file with a descriptive name because with Album, I can browse a catalog of detailed thumbnails of my photos extremely quickly and easily with no load up time. It's also sorted with a timeline by date so I can grab the timeline slider and view all pictures that were taken during a certain trip for instance. Not only that but it's got many tools that allow you quickly select a group of photos from your catalog and tag them with various descriptions like like "landscape" or "family" which then allows you quickly flip through relevant photos in the future.

Editing options are well thought out too, it provides all the easy cropping and red-eye tools etc. I need and saves both an unedited and edited version of my photos so I can go back to the original if need be.

Furthermore, the printing options are wonderful too. I can specify what size of prints I want, or even let photoshop create a bundle of sizes of a certain print or collection of prints (wallet, 8x10, 5x7) and send them to my photo printer. It even tries to save paper by intelligently cramming as many prints as possible onto a single 8x10 piece of paper. It also makes slideshows easily that can be sent to anyone else's computer, and also links to outlook express and makes it very easy to send vacation pictures etc. to others, even allowing you quickly adjust or cut down on the filesize of your pictures so they fit more easily into an email. Lastly, unlike other people's experiences, I've had absolutely no bugs with this software, which is what I would have expected from Adobe.

Overall, I've got Photoshop, and Photoshop elements, but for day to day use of my pictures including cataloging, editing, sorting, printing, and distributing my photos, I have repeatedly turned to Photoshop Album. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Rating:
Summary: Stacking Up Adobe and Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook
Review: Adobe Photo Album's advantage is its ability to catalog photos. However, I think that more and more people are beginning to look for the ability to organize photos with other files like words and music. For ease of use and ability to link photo with titles, text, songs and songs, the newly release Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook wins hands down.
[...]I want software like Adobe to go beyond generic photo organizing capabilities. I'm looking to the new generation of software like Memories that can handle all sorts of multimedia and is very easy to use

Rating:
Summary: An Adobe product strictly for amateurs
Review: While Photoshop Album has many exciting features, it is not a professional product comparable to other Photoshop products. The major flaw is that it constantly freezes up, sometimes with error messages, sometimes without. I have gone to the Adobe website for support, but am so overwhelmed by the number and complexity of suggested cures that I do not wish to begin. Ultimately, I had to remove it from my hard drive.

Anothr flaw, thumbnail filenames are not visible in either the catalogue or work space. I have nearly 10,000 files currently organized by the sequential numbering system that my Nikon Coolpix provides, including a detailed technical description of each photo. But instead of file numbers in Photoshop Album thumbnails, I get exclusively the date and time. While dates and user supplied tags, which Photshop Album provides, are acceptable methods of organization, filenames, which the program does not provide, are invaluable when working on specific projects, especially large ones like weddings, birthdays, holidays, family gatherings and such, which may contain several hundred files. When I open a folder of 300 digital wedding photos,for example, all taken on the same day, the date and time visible on Photoshop Album thumbnails are of no value-I need my original filenames, especially if I wish to retrieve, edit and save the original photos in different formats often with different photoshop effects. Without filenames, the program seems designed primarily for amateurs.
Another problem, when I move files around in the workplace, the program always snaps back to the beginning. If I switch, for example, file 124 with 126, the program executes the change then automatically snaps all the way back to the beginning row of files, forcing me to scroll after each switch back to the area I'm working in. This yo yo effect is very inefficient and thorougly annoying.

I have contacted Adobe, but no response. My advice, if you are a pro looking for a great way to organize thousands of files, wait for Photoshop Album 2.0. Maybe somebody out there in Seattle is really listening to customer complaints and will make the appropriate changes.

Rating:
Summary: PS Album is fine for finding photos; if you have the time
Review: I had been using my computer file system (image folders grouped by date or event) for several years to store and find photos. That method began to fail as the number of photos in my computer approached 1000; just too many places to look. PS Album provides an easier way to sort and find images. The best feature is that the program will automatically search your disk(s) and find, catalog and create a thumbnail of all the images on your disk(s). It even found some images I thought I had lost during a previous upgrade.
You can then use the default time line sort to find images, but only if you are one of those people who remember dates well. The provided search tools work well (if you can remember dates) or have spent a significant amount of time tagging the images with keys other than date/time. In either case, the program sometimes runs slowly, even on a 2.6 GHz machine, so it takes quite a while to look through large collections of images. The provided image editing tools are very limited, and calling an alternate editor from PS Album is a bit slow and clumsy. This product is quite useful but would be much better if it was faster and had methods to easily tag groups of images.

Rating:
Summary: Sanity for my Photos
Review: Photoshop Album has changed everything for me. I've been beta testing it for several months now and I am totally sold on Adobe's approach to photo categorization.

This software is great for everyone. If you're just looking for some basic software that will help you organize your photos simply, Photoshop Album is the perfect tool. You can import photos directly from your camera, and they are automatically organized chronologically, searchable via the convenient, intuitive timeline.

For those willing to put a little more time into organizing the photo collection, Photoshop Album's tagging system is the answer to your dreams. First you set up tags like "Mom", "Sis", "Egypt", "New Years Eve 2002" (grouped under "People", "Places", and "Events"). Now, simply drag the corresponding tags onto your photos, and Voila! Now you can see all photos from "New Years Eve 2002" or all photos of "Mom". You can even see all photos from "New Years Eve 2002" with "Mom" in them!

Once you have the photos you want to work with, making slideshows, printing or emailing to friends is, again, one click away. You can even fix-up photos to correct red eye, brightness, colours, etc.

The software is quick and stable and incredibly intuitive. There's no doubt the interface team has worked long hours with users to make these new concepts really work. No superfluous bells or whistles; just solid, creative usability throughout the application.

Best of all, this software is incredibly affordable. I would highly recommend this software to anyone who uses a digital camera!

Rating:
Summary: Great product if not be used to create VCD/DVD
Review: This is a nice product with pretty interface, feature like tagging are useful.

One big drawback is that it cannot create DVD. Even for VCD, it cannot create >100 photos in one VCD. (It adds a lot of junk in the VCD, and computer runs extremely slow and fulfill all the CD).