Rating: Summary: Simple Powerful Photo Organization Review: As an early adopter and enthusiast of digital photography I've managed to accumulate hundreds of photos, but like most people I don't have a good way to keep these organized with little effort. Windows has great simple digital photo features to easily upload photos, and even displays nice thumbnail photo albums in folders. However, a simple folder organization scheme has several limitations. You can only use ONE taxonomy and you have to organize the photos manually which can be time consuming. If you want to find all photos of a particular person, place, event, or time you're stuck with the single category you chose to arrange your photos by. Also, a organizing photos by time the is impossible because the date-time of each picture file on your computer defaults to when the file, not the photo, was created and even if this date is accurate it is still impossible to organize all photos across all folders at the same time.Adobe Photoshop Album solves this organization problem with a simple solution. First, Photoshop Album searches for all folders regardless of how you have them organized into folders, so you can say goodbye to arranging files into folders from now on. Secondly, Photoshop Album uses the information stored by your camera to organize photos by the ACTUAL time and date taken, not simply the date-time of the file. You could stop right there and simply search or view photos by a timeline. Since photos all represent events over time, this is a powerful and easy way to view photos, since you normally know about when you went to a particular place, or when a particular event was. However, if this isn't good enough for you, this is where Adobe Photoshop Album really shines. Adobe Photoshop Album has an extremely powerful scheme for maintaining MULTIPLE categories across all photos. All you do is create sub-categories under Person, Place, Event, or your own categories, which are displayed in a task bar next to a display of all the photos (similar to those in Windows or Office). Then you simply drag tags representing categories to groups or individual photos, to tell Photoshop what category the photo or photos belong to. Then, you can view your photos by ANY category or even combinations of categories. So you can find all Vacation Photos, or Vacation Photos of a particular place, or only those containing a particular person, or all photos of a particular person regardless of the event, time or place. Adding any tags you want to all your existing photos only takes a few minutes, and is completely painless and the simplicity in which you can arrange or find photos is amazing. For this ability alone and the time savings it gives you this product is worth getting. Adobe Photoshop Album also adds simple photo editing such as red eye, cropping, color, and brightness adjustment, but these are probably available in dedicated photo printing software that came with your camera, so these are nice to have, but not the core of the product. Remember, simple software is GOOD, because it saves you time! If you need more photo editing features, I would recommend the Photoshop Elements/Album bundles which is a very good value after rebates.
Rating: Summary: I love this software Review: I had the first version too and with the rebate decided to go ahead and upgrade. Like many people I have a couple of digital cameras and have had them for 3 years. I have built up about 2500+ pictures and was having a hard time storing them with just a standard file system. PS Album changes all of that. It will allow you to create tags for all of your pictures allowing you to easily search for the picture you want. As example I just went to my brother's wedding and took about 160 pics. If I want to find a picture of my grandmother there rather than having to look at all 160 of them I just choose two tags - "Jeff's Wedding and Grandmother" and it brings up all three pictures of grandmother at the wedding. Now you do have to tag your pictures, and it probably took me about 2 weeks when I first got the software to tag all of my old pictures. However if you do it as you go it is very quick and intuitive. And it makes finding a few pictures so much easier if you have a lot of them like I do. My machine is decent but not great. I have a P4 1.6 Ghz with 640 MB Ram. I have no problems what so ever browsing up all of my pictures at once. Most of them were taken with a 5 MP camera and average about 1.5 MB a piece. However as you browse them you are only looking at thumbprints and so it is really pretty quick. To summarize this software is very easy to use and I wouldn't want to be without it.
Rating: Summary: Best for sorting your movies Review: This is a very good program and the best when it comes to cataloging your photos. The tag system makes it very easy to find photos once you've taken the time to tag them. For instance, if you tag the photos, you can then find pictures of baby 1-2 months old, or the baby and grandma, etc. The "Fix" tools are also good basic tools that are a must to enhance digital photos. If you want a more robust photo editor buy Photoshop Elements, but for the basic color enhancements, etc. this works great.
Rating: Summary: Changed the Way I Store Digital Photos Review: I did not want this product. My husband bought it and thought it would be a good way to store the increasing number of digital photos on our computer. I liked my file folder system I already had. But once he taught me how to use it, I love it!! All the photos are right there to view. You can search by who is in the photo, there is a timeline at the top to view them by, etc. It took some time to classify all the existing photos, but it has been worth the time.
Rating: Summary: No problems here Review: I have read some of the previous reviews for this product. I have to say that I have never had any of the problems described. The program is easy to use and my pictures would be lost without it.
Rating: Summary: Half baked Review: Do not buy this program. The software is unable to video encode a slide show to video disk or dvd. The online help file instructs you to remove any background music. It's amazing how these companies charge full price, taking good money for a product that doesn't deliver as advertised.
Rating: Summary: Another Great Adobe Product Review: I also purchased this photo album together with Adobe elements 2.0. A nice software to get to make your not so great photos look terrific.again this is great if you are a beginner or experienced web designer.
Rating: Summary: Not that great! Review: I am disapointed with Adobe Photoshop Album. The quality of the photos I print using Microsoft Picture It! is much better. The colors print better with Picture It! also. I also found the Help with Photoshop Album to be lacking. I'm searching for a better program.
Rating: Summary: Not Ready for Prime Time Review: After searching for software that would display and organize my digital photos I purchased Adobe Photoshop Album. Big mistake! While the intended functionality of the software is perfect for my needs, the Adobe implementation is very unreliable. I'm not able to view a slide show without my computer (Windows 98SE) locking up. Installed on a new computer with Windows XP and now have an error message that displays on every boot up. None of the support has been helpful, including the laborious "debug the database yourself using Microsoft Access" advice I received and was able to do but to no avail. After spending several hours trying everything including Adobe's version "upgrades" I give up.
Rating: Summary: Liking this more and more everyday Review: My buddy Renato turned me on to Adobe Photoshop Album. At first I wasn't too impressed, but the more I used it the more I started liking it. As far as a way to catalog photos it works really well and is easy to use. However, it remains to be seen if it's really any better than just managing folders. The real benefits are what you can do with your photos once you import them into the catalog. For starters the Fix Photo options are better than I expected. The single click red eye removal works great, the ability to adjust lighting, brightness/contrast and color saturation are all big pluses. You can give color photos a black and white effect very easily and can enhance dull photos by adjusting the sharpness. All in all the fix photos options get a thumbs up. Next up are the all the cool things you can do with the Creations menu option. The coolest thing for me is the Web Photo Gallery. I post a lot of pictures to the web and this makes it so much easier than having to manually create the html. Thumbnails are automatically created and you can choose your design from a variety of stock templates (the ability to create custom templates would have been nice). The one drawback to the Web Gallery is there seems to be no way to share resources across galleries. If you want to create 2 galleries and use the same template you cannot specify the same directory to put the GIFs and JPGs. So that means you have to store multiple versions of the same files on your web server. The good part is that the files take up a relatively small amount of space (but if disk space is an issue this doesn't help). You can create slide shows that offer a nice alternative to the slideshow capability in Windows XP. The 3D gallery with its mood music is really cool, but the pictures are not a clear as when you view the in the catalog. You can create calendars and all kinds of other happy hoo-haw. Adobe Photoshop Album is definitely a fun product to play with and is worth the few sheckles it costs you.
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