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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: 3 stars
Summary: Very nice interface -- some serious limitations
Review: I have just loaded this and done a first pass at organizing and playing with some photos.

Positives:
- Great collection of features; I will use this to replace a number of other programs that I was using to do specialized tasks.

- Great interface with Adobe Elements 2.0. That makes this a very nice package for the beginning amateur to semi-serious amateur.

- Extremely easy to use the basic features.

Cons:
- Only has interface with Shutterfly. I can find no way to over-ride Adobe's default selection of Shutterfly as online photo service; as a longtime and happy Ofoto user I do not want to switch or deal with two online photo services.

- No capability that I can detect to over-ride the default category classification (people, places, events, etc.). This is not fatal -- because the creation of sub-categories is easy and flexible -- but they must have done this in the interest of greater stability and ease of use.

- Also, as another reviewer has noted, the formats for printing 4 by 6 photos have a border on them...in this day of photo printers that make borderless prints I don't understand this at all.

- I've been unable to get this to burn a Video CD. The "creation wizard" is quite simple but won't recognize the proper drive on my PC, and there doesn't appear to be a way to change. Adobe's help is pretty thin, and their website pretty much leaves you up to a chaotic, unorganized customer forum for help [By the way, if the flaws I point out are fixable, they certainly didn't yield to a couple of hours of efforts to find help w/in the program or Adobe's site].

Overall, though, I think this is a great program -- 5 stars for concept and interface, 1 star for the problems, averages out a 3 or so.

Just as Elements made a very nice jump from version 1 to version 2, I would expect Album will do the same. Thus I'm guessing the time I take to make Album my default photo viewer/organizer is going to be worth it. Album and Elements together make a great combo, once they get a couple of bugs fixed.

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Priced just right
Review: After all the money I've spent on Adobe software over the years I was delighted when they gave this away free at PMA. Now I see its PC-only so I guess I'm getting my money's worth.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A Version 1.0 Product
Review: While the feature set described in this software is there, this is definitely the first pass. The software is sluggish on my 933MHz Pentium III, it is prone to crash or lock up, the software doesn't remember your view settings if you leave a window, support for 3rd party photo printing is currently minimal (one vendor), and the DVD format the software burns is not compatible with all DVD players. Wait for a major update before bothering with this software.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Extraordinary
Review: This is a great product. I am an avid photographer (hobby, not profession) and since getting a Nikon scanner two years ago I have several thousand scanned images on hard disc, CD and DVD. Organizing and finding images has been a nightmare. Photoshop Album has allowed me to begin organizing this huge mess. You can attach keywords to image files, along with dates and other descriptive tags. You can do this to images you have on any media -- the images do not all need to be on one hard drive. Then, after the lengthy task of keywording and tagging all fo the images, you have what is basically a huge catalog of images that you can search by any number of various methods, including a timeline that you can scroll through. Photoshop Album will take some patience to setup and get everything cataloged, but once you start you will find that organizing your images is much easier than before. I find this software to be excellent, and it works well with Adobe's Photoshop.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Designed by Someone with a Brain
Review: Adobe has finally fired all of it's programmers! I know this, because Adobe Photoshop Album actually works like people think.

Neat feature: add more than one "tag" to photos, and, search by multiple tags! Example: you own two pets.. Kitty-Kitty and Puppy-Dog. Kitty is in two pictures and tagged as "Kitty." Puppy is in two photos tagged as "Puppy." Both are in yet two more, together. Click the Kitty tag, CTRL-click the Puppy tag, then right-click and choose between "New search using these tags," or "Add these tags to criteria," and finally, "add these tags to selected photo(s)." If you choose the first option, you get the two images which have both tags (and animals (uh, I mean "companions," if you live in California)).

Neat!

You can right-click on the "tag" on a photo, and choose to remove the tag (in case you make a boo-boo). And, if there are multiple tags associated with the photo, choose to remove the one you find inapproriate.

When creating a Web Page out of selected photos, PhotoImpact does a better job of reducing file size while maintaining image quality. At least Adobe doesn't create fifty-billion useless, empty tables per picture as PhotoImpact does. You may find yourself switching between multiple programs to get the size and quality your site viewers (and you) can live with on this one.

Adobe Photoshop Album also offers multiple thumbnail views, and you can press F11 (standard keystroke in Internet Explorer and Opera browsers) to get a full-screen view of a selected image. This is useful on those large photos where the subject is a mere speck, and you can't quite make-out what's in the thumbnail.

There are areas I don't like, such as you're stuck with what Adobe considers the Four Basic Categories (People, Places, Events and Other) and they're ain't nuttin' you can do about it. Yeah, it's a "programmer" paradigm that they KNOW best. But, with this I can live. The other benefits far outweigh the drawbacks for the average user, and with a little creative forethought, this limitation can be overcome.

If you're the typical "Home User," and you don't need the power of Oracle to catalog your zillions of photos or the speed of PostgresSQL, then this program is deserves be in your future.

If you're a heavy-duty photographer, then why are you looking at a $...program to catalog your pics? That's kind-of like buying a Hassleblad and getting your photos processed at the One Hour booth at K-Mart, isn't it???

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A GREAT solution!
Review: This software is fantastic. It does a great job of cataloging your digital image collection. I have nearly 5500 digital images on 6 CDR's back to 1999. I love the ability of the software to create a thumbnail (proxy they call it) on the PC, while leaving the original image on the CDR. If I want to export, print or work with the original image, the software prompts me and tells me what CDR it is on! The ability to tag files is incredible. The more effort you put into tagging the files, the better the softwares searches become later. I tagged each of my nearly 5500 files with the people that were in them, the occasion they were taken for AND the location they were taken in (when it was relevant). It took me a total of about 14 hours to go back over my 5500 images since 1999. It is truly an amazing product.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Sounds great but...
Review: Sounds great, but where is the Mac version?

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not quite there yet....
Review: This is an OK program for organizing home image files in an innovative way. The tagging system saves some trouble of naming your images properly.
However, it does not work if you're trying to organize thousands of photos on your harddrive. I think that the program will be at least a little better if it is also coupled with the ability to browse (in the Windows Explorer style, such as ACDSee) the images and also display the file names on the thumbnails. I got the software couple months ago, and I have not touched it since the first couple days of getting it. I still use ACDSee to organize and browse all my images.
Overall, this probably works for home users, but for more professional image management, it still has a long way to go.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I love this program!
Review: I've had the program for a few days now and I've been experimenting with a small dataset to see how it works. So far everything has worked perfectly. I like the tags. I love the fact that I can redate the ancient photos I scanned last week so they have reasonably good dates attached to them.

Great program.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Critical Flaw
Review: As a photographer & Photoshop 7 user, I chose this program to be assured of it's "full" support for Photoshop .psd image files, which it has.

I fully expected that the program would provide me the ability to create "my own" "Categories", then, create "Sub-Categories within them.

Adobe apparently felt that the typical user's of the program would lack the creative intelligence to create Main Category-titles of there own, so they, "In Microsoft-mentality", decided to provide their choices, which can't be changed or renamed.

There's a work-around, in which you can select Adobe's "Other" category, and then make Sub-Categories within Sub-Categories; but need for a "work-around" is less than I'd expected from Adobe.

I'd suggest checking out Picaso...or Kodak Easy Share -Free dowload, before settling on this one!


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