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Adobe Photoshop Album

Adobe Photoshop Album

List Price: $49.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Poorly conceived, poorly implemented
Review: Despite promising to put all your photo management needs in one box, Photoshop Album fails to deliver. As a photo organizer, it is disappointing. Because of the choice to use photo "tagging" rather than heirarchical structure, displays are chaotic and lack obvious features such as filename labeling. Print features are weak and editing features are very limited. ...

But I had assumed, especially given the jazzy options described in the advertising, that Adobe could be trusted to deliver a very high-quality slideshow program. Wrong. This mediocre program is no better than many free downloads. Presentation choices are limited. For example, the user has little control over the number of images on a page (pick 1-each, 2-each, or a rigid 1-3-2 rotation). The image quality of albums exported to pdf format is surprisingly weak, and rendered more objectionable by the lack of any alternative sharing format (other than the deplorable VCD format already amply criticized on this page). Transitions are graphically unsophisticated. One cannot add captions to slides and pages within the album; one must append them to the image itself, requiring a workaround if you wish to use the same image with different captions in different albums.

On top of that, Photoshop Album, even with the recent 1.0.1 update, is terribly buggy. Again, slideshows are the worst offenders. How Adobe managed to create so many conflicts is difficult to imagine, given that we are working with relatively simple image data.

To justify its publication, this program must deliver either simple tools or powerful tools. The tools are too limited to be powerful and too buggy to be simple. ...

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A pretty good first try
Review: In the old Byte Magazine, Pournelle had a phrase he used for some products: "Infuriatingly Good." Meaning that the product (usually software) was generally excellent and enticingly useful, but had flaws that kept you pulling your hair.

That's my feeling about PhotoShop Album (PSA).

I'll need to give Adobe some slack here. I have PSA version 1.0, and I expect they will grow and improve it over time. (It takes Microsoft at least version 3.0 to get anything really good.)

I am in hearty agreement with nearly all of the positive comments about this software that I have seen in the other reviews. And there are two file handling functions that I really like that no one has mentioned:

1) It painlessly keeps the original image safe and lets you work with a copy when you need to edit it. And (unless you move the file to another directory)it keeps a hook between the original and the edited version. This is a bonus for us obsessive types that have a NEED to keep originals safe.

2) It facilitates archiving images to a permanent secondary storage like a CD. Again, this is important for safeguarding original images of valuable pictures in case the hard drive dies or you just start running short on space.

In spite of all the really excellent things about this program, there are some frustrations in the design that I hope Adobe will fix.

1) The Organizational Idea of this program is that you can put all your files in one area of the hard drive and never need to move them again. I understand where they are going with this, but I DO NOT like it. I use other programs in addition to PSA, and I want the freedom to move image files around on my hard drive. (Yes, you can move them around and then "re-connect" between the database image and the file, but this is kludgy, links between files get lost, and a lot of extra steps are involved.) Hopefully this will be fixed in VersionNext.

2) As good as the organization scheme is, it has two frustrating limits. First you are stuck with only four top level categories (or 5 if you use the special "Favorites" group) They are a good set: People, Places, Events and Other. But they are limiting. Even more limiting is that PSA only permits three levels of heirarchy. For example, you can have Places--Arizona--Grand Canyon. But you cannot have Places--Arizona--Grand Canyon--North Rim. If you have a LOT of Grand Canyon images, you want to be able to have that extra level for classification. And there are a lot of situations where I would like to have that fourth heirarchy level. Geez, when I start importing my Botanical images, I will want several levels. Yes, there are workarounds I can use to make the Four Category Three Level limitation work, But I would like the software to make it easier.

There are a few other niggling irritations, like the Advertisement it inserts into your e-mail when you use the Share Function, but I can live with them.

All told, this is a very promising program, and I will use it. And I look forward to giving the next version 5 stars.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great tool for families with lots of photos!
Review: I was looking for a tool so I could easily make slideshows of our digital photos to send to grandparents, family and friends. I was doing pretty well organizing our digital photos, but it was getting tough. I didn't have an EASY way to print the photos, without wasting a lot of expensive photo paper.

I love this software!

It does practically everything I would want to do with our photos. Before this came out, it would have cost at least twice that to get just a few of these features.

It is soooo easy to make slideshows and albums, save them as .pdf, then I dump them on a CD and send them off to family. This is a great way to score with your mother-in-law!

It's so easy to tag photos. I created a tag for my parents when they were visiting. They quickly looked through the photos and tagged the ones they wanted prints of. Then I just clicked on their tag, said print... DONE

There are a few bugs, and a few enhancements that would be nice. Considering that this is the first version, it is REALLY GREAT! I can't wait to see what they come up with for Version 2.0.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wonderful product!
Review: This is a wonderful, easy to use, product for managing digital photographs. I have almost 5,000 digital photographs on my computer and find Adobe Photoshop Album to be an excellent tool for cataloging and using my pictures. The 'Fix' section has the best red eye reduction I have seen anywhere. The printing functions work well and the extra, 'fun' things like the 3-D galleries and creating albums are terrific. As soon as I saw how great this was I urged my husband to buy a copy as well. My only complaint is that the price dropped several dollars as soon as I bought mine!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: THIS IS a good product, and if your not sure, try the trial
Review: Although many people wrote bad reviews for this, I have looked at the trial and am going to buy ASAP. This ia a great product ot orgainze any collection of photos. It is also packed full of features for every user, professional and average day consumer. If you want you can head on over to adobe.com and check ou the trial that has now been released. It is diffinitely worth a look.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not up to Adobe standards
Review: I purchased the software to create slideshows viewable on the DVD player. The software worked as stated but the resolution on the slideshow was poor. There was not enough options for music; listening to the same song (mp3) over and over got boring. These two problems make is necessary for me to look for other software. Good features were timeline; ability to add captions and ability to add video clips. I hope Adobe comes up with a free upgrade for their existing customers. They certainly did NOT live up to quality of products we expect from Adobe.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: good idea - buggy
Review: i think some of the features of this program are excellent. the tagging is a very easy and intuitive way to organize the photos. i have about 2000 images and i just blasted thru them... tagging/cross tagging every photo.

the problem is... it worked for a few times, and now it hangs everytime! and then i can't end it. i have to do a soft reboot using the power button. XP home (totally new install). i've updated the program w/ 1.01 (which, inexplicably changes the version number to 1.050) and it's still the same problem.

so, i can't recommend this program. wait for version 2.0.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Greaaat product
Review: Love this product. I can finally manage my digital camera pictures at ease. The best thing about this software is it's easy to use don't need to read the manual to use this.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Buggiest Adobe application ever. Do not buy.
Review: This is the worst piece of Adobe software ever. If the higher priced applications like Photoshop, etc. would be so bad, Adobe would not exist today. When I installed my copy, I could not even browse to files on my D: partition. Album could only recognize files on the C: partition. Unusable.
Look for hundreds of other complaints on Adobe's support discussion board.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not worth the money...
Review: PC Magazine gave this program 5 stars. Did they use it or just read the feature list? I did not have any technical problems with the program just design and features. For a program that is first and foremost a catalog, there's no easy way to simply say "update my catalog." If you delete a file without using Album it tries to reconnect. No way to turn this irritating feature off. No way to select extensions to include in Album. Although it lets you select the folders you want included, you can't save the list for next time. It's also very slow to display the images and you don't have zoom capability. For viewing, it's not nearly as handy as Irfanview which is FREE. I remember Adobe Photo Deluxe version 1 which was so slow and bug riddled as to be unuseable. Eventually the product died. Looks like this one will follow in those ugly footsteps. Wish I could get my money back. Oh, I do like the timeline though. Really just a big disappointment.


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