Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe [PhotoRecover, Paint Shop Xtras, 250 Project Photos by Corbis, Avery Digital Starter Pack]

Rating:
Summary: Easy to use
Review: I currently use PSP8 at home and work and find it very strong so when I needed a photo program I turned to JASC. I had a project to do, pictures slideshow to music. While the image editing worked great, turning a group of pictures into a video slideshow didn't. Pictures were out of order which I had painstakenly put in a certain order and although I had created a video menu screen with music it failed to work in both my computer and home DVD player. If your instrested in video or DVD production I would look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Good enough for 90% of my images, then there's Photoshop
Review: I first started using a digital camera in 1999. It was a $700 1 megapixel Epson, it was such a big deal then that Epson coined it 'The Megapixel' camera. The sofware included was 'Image Expert' by Sierra Imaging. ImageExpert was compact and very easy to use. It allowed me to accomplish 90% of my photography tasks. I've used the software it for the next 4 digital cameras and 2 computers. Never felt the need to upgrade or replace the software. Although once in a while I would use Photoshop to really work an image.

I liked Image Expert very much and was trying to find the latest version of it. I couldn't find it initially since a few years is an eternity in the digital world. With a little help from Google, I was able to trace it to 'JASC PAINTSHOP PHOTO ALBUM 5'. Jasc Software, the makers of Paintshop Pro bought the rights of Image Expert from Sierra Imaging and called it 'Jasc Aftershot' eventually it was changed to it's current name. In October 2004, Jasc Software was bought out by Corel, makers of WordPerfect, CorelDraw etc. I was pleased that this software is part of Corel as it would certainly guarantee support, quality and longevity.

I have 4 days left in the trial version I'm ready buy it and to share my experiences:

The first thing you'll notice is a very clean and simple interface with pleasant colors and large buttons. The top of the screen is your traditional Windows Pulldown menu's, (file, edit, view ...tools, help ...etc) so there's inmediate familiarity. Right below you'll find four large tabs: Organize, Enhance, Create and share. Clicking each Tab will reveal a separate set of related tools buttons. The program is very intuitive and these tabs pretty much summarizes the software.

Tool highlights (This is the sequence that I use) :

1. Cropping: click on the crop button, a cropping box appears on the image, click and drag the edges of the box, click the ok button and that's it.

2. Quick Fix: a one button tool that will eliminate the 'haze' found in many digital photos, It's similar to the 'autolevels' tool in Photoshop. I suspect that there's some sharpening and contrast enhancement also. Unless you have extreme lighting and colorcast situations the 'QuickFix' button is all you need!

3. Red Eye: Never used a redeye tool it until now. Simply click on the redeye tool, pan and zoom, place the circle on eye, click and voila! Like magic.

4. Keywords: open image, select key work on left panel (birthday, vacation ...etc) or type your own. Once you save the image the keywords are imbeded. You can then retrieve the image by keywords, no need to mess around with filenaming.

3. Print Templates: This is my favorite feature. Navigate to templates, choose your template and the software will populate it with images of your current folder. My favorite template is an 8.5x11 sheet containing two 4x6's and several wallet and mini wallet sizes.

Well that's it! I recommend this software without hesitation!

Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Review: I love Photo Album. It's so easy to use. The Quick Fix feature is worth the price of the program - it fixes all of my photos and is totally amazing. I also like the picture frames.

I haven't made one of the hardcover books yet, but I do use it a lot to create greeting cards. I made one for my father with a picture of me and him. He loved it and it's so much more personal than a regular greeting card. Best of all, I made it in about 5 minutes before I went to work!


Rating:
Summary: Easy to use, easy to organize, easy to back up
Review: I was looking for a piece of software to help me manage my growing cache of digital photos. I looked at uLead, iMatch, IDImager, Adobe, and more. I chose Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe. It is well designed, easy to use and does all I need.

- Organize by keyword, date, file folder
- Archive to CDs and access them (the software "remembers" where they are)
- Quickly do the most common photo enhancements (red eye, contrast, etc.)
- Fast loading of images
- Easy to pull the pictures off of my camera's CF card

They have a free trial at www.jasc.com, and I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Basic, but most well-rounded.
Review: Jasc's Photo Paint Shop Album (PPSA) Version 5.0.1 is a nice upgrade to version 4 that puts the program on equal or slightly better footing with ACDSystem's ACDSee version 6 and Adobe's PhotoShop Album (PSA) version 2. Version 5 introduces a prettier interface; adds a calendar-based organizational view, a bunch of creative project and print templates - for coffee books, CD/DVD labels, calendars, etc.; and some basic archival features. PPSA's strength is that it bundles together the most variety of features of any consumer-grade digital media library manager, and that makes Paint Shop Photo Album the most well-rounded choice for mainstream beginner and intermediate users new to digital image management.

With the addition of creative project templates, Photo Paint Shop Album 5 becomes a better choice than Adobe PhotoShop Album 2. The latter's crippling weakness is that it is unable to automatically detect and synchronize new or deleted photographs to and from its internal catalog database. Unlike ACDSee 6 and PhotoShow Deluxe 3, PPSA's creative projects are things users may print themselves. ACDSee and PhotoShow Deluxe simply supply links to websites (Snapfish, etc.) where users order and pay for their own creations.

Consumers should understand that given Photo Paint Shop Album's low price, competitor programs may exceed the depth of any particular module(s) in PPSA. For example, ACDSee has the better file-level manager. Simple Star's PhotoShow Deluxe 3 has the better slideshow module. With these other choices however, users may find themselves purchasing additional programs to match the breadth of Photo Paint Shop Album's functionality.

If there is a weakness to Photo Paint Shop Album, it is metadata. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand a picture's content or context. (E.g., When and where was this picture taken? What is this a picture of? Who are these people?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. Metadata is the useful mnemonic device that stores this information.

Photo Paint Shop Album locks picture metadata (image title, description, and keyword category) inside a proprietary database instead of supporting the EXIF and IPTC metadata standards (which embed metadata inside the picture file). PPSA users therefore cannot easily share a complete memory with those who do not use Photo Paint Shop Album. Without accompanying metadata, an office party photograph (Office Holiday Party 2004: Roy and his wife Maya, Ciara and Laura. Unbeknownst to Maya, Ciara is Roy's workplace mistress.) quickly becomes just another picture. As digital photograph collections become mainstream, support for EXIF and IPTC metadata should become only more important, to provide a standard, seamless way to share, search for and organize images based on timestamp and picture caption content - among a user's chosen image manager, online photo-sharing service (such as Fotki.com), and family and friends (who may use something other than Photo Paint Shop Album). PPSA users who want to share picture metadata with other users must manually copy and paste it for each picture they want to share.

In Version 5, Paint Shop Photo Album's continued lack of EXIF and IPTC metadata support becomes a functional liability. Version 5's new Calendar View utilizes EXIF timestamp information to create its timeline-based organizational view of pictures, but ironically, the program lacks an EXIF editor. Users who want to scan and organize their shoeboxes of old photographs and film negatives, and those who order picture CD's along with their analog film developing orders cannot take full advantage of PPSA's Calendar View. PPSA sorts pictures lacking EXIF timestamps by the file system's Last Modified Date, because the program cannot timestamp the original date the photograph was taken. Fortunately, users can turn to freeware EXIF metadata editors to mitigate this issue, such as Exifer (http://www.exifer.friedemann.info).

Despite PPSA's letdown on EXIF and IPTC metadata support, most consumer-grade digital media library managers also still do poorly in metadata management, which sort of defeats the purpose of their existence. Of Paint Shop Photo Album's competitors, only ACDSee has EXIF metadata editing abilities, and therefore, a fully-functional Calendar View.

Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 5 is a well-rounded introduction to digital image library management. Curious users may quickly outgrow PPSA's rudimentary implementations of many features and look for more advanced software, but Paint Shop Photo Album 5 introduces people to more exciting possibilities of digital photography and digital image library management than its competitors.

Rating:
Summary: Decent but could be so much better with attention to details
Review: Some of the other reviewers have here have spelled out where the program works well so you can consider this the CONS review.

1. The biggest complaint is speed. Opening, editing and building thumbnails are all agonizingly slow. My pictures are stored on a server in my home so there is some understandable delay. But I also use Paint Shop Pro 6 (PSP6) which builds thumbnails faster that I can see them and opens and edits pictures far faster. My wife gets so frustrated with PSPA5s slow speed that she ends up opening and editing in PSP6 and then I loose all EXIF data. Last night added a new folder of about 45 images and it took at least 3 minutes to build all the thumbnails.

2. The next thing is opening folders. PSPA5 calls folders albums. This is a nice idea but is it really necessary to take a thing we all know and love and try to convince us it is something else? Anyway, jumping to folders is a little annoying. PSPA4 would not open into the last used folder if that folder was on a network share. That apparently is the case with PSPS5 as well.

3. Also when you navigate the folders it attempts to catalog every folder you click on. There should be someway of getting to the folders without having to wait for every other folder to get cataloged. You can use the +- tree expanders but they are small and you find yourself clicking the folder anyway. Again the speed issue is a thing.

4. While I am thinking of folders, renaming an album (folder) can be frustrating. I occasionally get errors saying the folder cannot be renamed - especially if you are renaming to correct an upper case/lower case problem. I then have to edit the folder name in Windows and wait for PSPA5 to re-catalog the folder. Again the speed issue is a thing.

5. The default operation when dragging pictures between folders is to copy them. Quite by accident I found that if you hold the <shift> key while dragging and dropping then the program moves the pictures. I think the default should be to move them or at least allow the user to set a default. This would emulate the basic Windows interface that we are all used to. In addition, when moving files while holding the <shift> key I frequently get errors. If I just keep moving the same files again and again eventually they all move. So obviously there is no real problem or they wouldn't end up all moving.

6. Imaging sorting is all over the place. I can find no standard that is used to sort images. It makes me think they are sorted in the order they were written to the hard drive. Even the most basic sort you would think of, alphabetical, is not used be default. In fact there is no default sorting. It doesn't even keep the sort order from the last time you opened the folder. After speed this has got to be the most annoying thing about SPSA5 (and 4 by the way). At least they added the ability to sort by Date Taken. But again when you sort it takes forever. At the very least each folders sort should be remembered and reused between startups. Better yet would be the option to set a default sort for all folders.

7. Red-eye - This is pathetic. I tried last night to fix red-eye on a lot of these 45 pictures I mentioned above. The pictures were taken inside in a dimly lit room so there was lots of red-eye. I think PSPA5 was able to fix about 10% of them without making the people look like zombies. On a scale of 1-10, the Quick Red Eye function is a 2 and the Advanced Red Eeye function is a 3. I am really disappointed with this.

8. Network support is terrible. As I mentioned above, building thumbnails of a network folder is slow, the program won't re-open a network folder on startup and then I find that is apparently doesn't like Windows Offline Files and Folders. I set some of my picture folder for Offline Use so I could take them with me on my laptop to show other people while on the road. So when on the road and in Offline mode, PSPA5 takes even longer to load. I get frequently errors on the first startup attempt, only to start successfully on the second attempt. Occasionally it won't start at all unless I restart the PC. In the year 2004 when more people are using networks at home and sharing images, music and other content among multiple PCs, media players and other new devices, any program like this should work flawlessly in that environment.

9. Some of the sharing tools are pretty poor -
- Some of the web templates look like they were designed by 8th graders
- The slide show is still rough and shows the Jasc advertisement when run on a PC. There is no apparent way to bring back the slideshow toolbar once it is closed.
- The Photo CD function only allows you to make one CD layout at a time. There is no way to save a project and start a new one. If you need to stop one you are working on to do another you must loose all your work. Not to mention the poor reliability of making a working CD. You can only use one song per show instead of multiples (I got around this by merging a couple MP3s to get the right length and not replay the same song)

10. Support - in the many months since release they have come out with all of 1 update, 5.01. With all these potential fixes they couldn't come up with a few more updates to improve the user experience. Oh sorry, I forgot, they are saving them for version 6 for which they expect us to pay.

11. Online forums - Jasc has some nice looking forums where users can share their experiences (translated: Complaints) and Jasc has apparently been nice enough to setup these forums and then ignore them completely. Users post all kinds of questions, feature requests, technical issues and the only response they get is from other users with the same problems. These forums may be the number one place to find out about competing products. I gave up on the forums months ago.


So after all that where does one go if not PSPA5? I am not sure. I have tried several other photo managers/editors and they are all mediocre at best. This market is not mature enough to say there is a clear winner. PSPS5 covers a lot of bases and the others I have tried all have equally if not even more annoying "features". The others all have their advantages but one cannot spend 40-50 bucks each on 3-4 different programs just to get all the features you want.

A programmer book I read a portion of (Joel on Software) talked a lot about user expectation being a huge part of a successful user interface. And user expectations have been set by the Windows environment. So when a program comes along and accomplishes similar functions as Windows but in a different way the user gets frustrated and thinks the software is poorly written. The programmer can get on their soapbox all they want and preach about why the Windows method is inferior and theirs is superior - but in the end if the program doesn't perform the way the users expects, the software is perceived as flawed and inferior. The products in this market segment suffer from programmer piety a great deal.

Maybe you should just print all your photos and put them in real, touchable, tangible photo albums - ya know, those book-like things you used to buy to store your photos?

Good luck