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Summary: Comparing Digital Image& Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook
Review: Digital Image advantage continues to be smooth integration between photo editing and user friendliness. [...]
I think many people are already looking to go beyond generic photo organizing capabilities and looking to the new generation of software like Memories that can handle all sorts of multimedia and is very easy to use
Rating: 
Summary: Exceeded my expectations day one
Review: Floundered with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 for over one year. Finally got to the point that I was totally dissatisfied because I couldn't do a simple red eye fix easily. Decided to invest in another digital photo editing package. After reading for 2 hours choose MS Digital Image Suite 9. The first 30 minutes that played around with the package, I could do more with it than the 1 1/2 years with Adobe. This package is very intuitive. I was accomplishing edits and special effects that I was never able to do with Adobe.
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Summary: Great for Busy Moms Who Love to Chronicle
Review: I am not a professional photographer, nor am I a super computer-savy person. However, I am relatively adept at both, and interested on producing improved, cataloged photos as I AM a prolific chronicler of my two young childrens' early years. I have already purchased/was given various programs including Photoshop, but found them much too time-consuming to master. For my purposes, DIS has been EXCELLENT. If you are looking for ease of operation for private use, this intuitve software is a great purchase. Without reading a single help topic, one can quickly create fantastic-looking pieces of art, and efficiently organize all his photos, both scanned and taken directly from the camera. DIS is, in my opinion, a remarkably helpful product for those who would rather be living the experiences that produce the photos than sitting behind a computer swearing at the software that is supposed to enhance them.
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Summary: AWESOME!!!!
Review: I am so impressed with this product. AWESOME. I truly believe this is the best consumer product ever released. I have finally organized all of my photos so easily. I take a ton of photos and now it's really easy for me to find them. I have used the eraser tool and it helped me to clean up my photos. I love add flash feature, and the blending brush too. All around, I'm really impressed!!
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Summary: Basic features are missing!
Review: I had trouble immediately upon using Microsoft's D.I.S. 9
You decide if these will bother you:
1) No lossless .jpg rotate. This means you can't straighten out photos you took while holding the camera sideways without recompressing the image and consequently throwing away image data in the process. I find this deeply disturbing, since every other image manager I've used has this feature, even freeware apps.
2) No auto-rotate. This means that you can't just use the information your camera puts in the .jpg file to have the software automatically re-oritent pictures taken while the camera was sideways. Ever upload 50 or 100 pictures at once to your computer? If so, you probably won't appreciate having to rotate them one at a time to the proper orientation.
3) No thumbnail update. This one takes the cake. If you alter a picture in another image program (perhaps to avoid the two problems above!) then the thumbnail shown will NOT be updated. I called MS about this and the best they told me was to delete the .POD database file. If you have 1000's of pics like I do, you won't appreciate the time wasted to rebuild this large database. So in summary, I'm pretty much living with the image manager I had before I bought D.I.S. 9. Good luck in your decision.
Rating:
Summary: Basic features are missing!
Review: I had trouble immediately upon using Microsoft's D.I.S. 9
You decide if these will bother you:
1) No lossless .jpg rotate. This means you can't straighten out photos you took while holding the camera sideways without recompressing the image and consequently throwing away image data in the process. I find this deeply disturbing, since every other image manager I've used has this feature, even freeware apps.
2) No auto-rotate. This means that you can't just use the information your camera puts in the .jpg file to have the software automatically re-oritent pictures taken while the camera was sideways. Ever upload 50 or 100 pictures at once to your computer? If so, you probably won't appreciate having to rotate them one at a time to the proper orientation.
3) No thumbnail update. This one takes the cake. If you alter a picture in another image program (perhaps to avoid the two problems above!) then the thumbnail shown will NOT be updated. I called MS about this and the best they told me was to delete the .POD database file. If you have 1000's of pics like I do, you won't appreciate the time wasted to rebuild this large database. So in summary, I'm pretty much living with the image manager I had before I bought D.I.S. 9. Good luck in your decision.
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Summary: Surprisingly Powerful Tools
Review: I have always heard that Adobe is the industry standard so I was a bit hesitant to purchase this product. After using it for a couple of weeks, I am really impressed. I have found that the tools are actually better than the ones I have found in Adobe's Elements product and they are far quicker to use. I am particularly impressed by all of the advanced tools like color channel level adjustment, the blending brush, the airbrush, and the smart erase features. The product is intuitive as well and makes it easy to find photos and also archive them. This will replace all of my other applications as my primary image editor.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for most people
Review: I have used several programs like ACDSee, Adobe Elements, Photoshop Album, and Photoshop 7 and some other photo editing and organization programs. I like the ease and simplicity that ACDSee offers. It is fast and stable with some basic editing features built in. I like the advanced features of Adobe Elements 2.0. But I don't have the time or desire to become an expert to be able to use it. I think overall, the Digital Image Suite 9 package is a nice balance. It's fast, clean, kind of intuitive, and you get a full featured package with enough advanced features to keep most people happy. One reviewer said this product did not have 48 bit support, only 24 bit. Well guess what...no other editing packages provide support for 48 bit! Just recently, Photoshop CS is the first product to provide true 48 bit support. I have my own business and wanted to whip up a corporate logo fast. I spent days exploring and trying to figure out Adobe Elements. I bought a beginners book, and dedicated 4 straight days to it. It got me nowhere. I took the book back and decided not to purchase a full version of Elements.
I borrowed this program from a friend, tried it and banged out a corporate logo in 2 days. I bought this program and I have been happy with it. However, I have no desire to develop my photo editing skills since my business is in computer networks, not photo editing. I do take photos of client locations so I can plan cabling and setups. I use this program for quickie editing and then I am done. Overall, the novice/beginner will appreciate the simplicity, the tutorials and integration between all components. The price seems fair too. If your desires grow, you can always advance to something like Photoshop Elements or CS.
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Summary: Somehow Not That Much Better Than PhotoDraw
Review: I was using PhotoDraw (Microsoft's predecessor to Picture It!) for basic photo editing since 1999. I picked up this new product primarily because of the library program. The library component works nicely, pretty much as advertised, but it's still pretty basic and not worth [the money]on its own. So I expected the photo editing software to be a marked improvement over PhotoDraw. It's not.
There are some improvements, particularly giving the user more control over resolution, vastly improved printing options, and automatic white balancing. However, some PhotoDraw features are missing ("arrange" function is sorely missed) or hard to use (filling a specific area with an effect or color is nearly impossible).
So while this program has been stable and would likely suit someone looking for his first photo editing program, it's no world-beater and would be a much more convincing value if priced [lower].
Rating: 
Summary: A real resource hog. I doubt I'm the most prolific user...
Review: I've been using digital cameras for about 4 years and have roughtly 15K photos and had overgrown the freeware ACeeDSee program. I purchased the DIS9 and Adobe PS Element/Album 2.0 at the same time and started with DIS9 since it has a 30 day money back guarantee. After installing the DIS9's Library, I was pleased to have it locate and add all of my photos in the library using the search feature. The first thing I did was archive all my photos to three DVD's which was very simple and reasonably fast. So far, so good... Then I tried browsing my photos in order to experiment with tags and organizing. I found, however, that many of the photo thumbnails were not showing. I did see them showing up here and there periodically added and since the CPU meter was pegged at the high 90% level, I figured it was just digesting the large input creating thumbnails. I decided to let it crank on overnight. Next morning (11 hours later), I found it still churning away and not only that, I could not get the program to respond any faster than several seconds after clicking a photo or menu item. I have a AMD XP2400+ with 1 GB of RAM and over 240 GB HDD space, so I don't think I am lacking resources. I removed and re-installed the program, but still high CPU usage and slow responses. MS Tech Support suggested I try it all again in safe mode (no other programs or services dragging down performance). This made no difference. I let the program run for nearly a full day (on the theory that it was *still* in a one-time process of creating thumbnails), but it still was the same slow speed. Seeing this was unlikely to change, I installed Adobe PS Album. I had to split up the imports into roughly 5K photos each or it would crash, but, it has all the my photos, and I can now organize them with tags and such. I don't know about it's archive abilities, but if there are no major snags, it will probably do the trick. MS does not seem to have an answer to the problem other than suggesting I utilize the 30 return policy. Someone *must* be testing the program with a lot more photos than I have. Very strange...
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