Adobe Photoshop Album

Rating:
Summary: Greate catalog ... but ...
Review: To make it short, the catalog piece of the program is every dollar worth I paid for PS Album. I imported 10000 pictured and categorized all of them in 5-6 hours. Now I'm able to find pictures in seconds. Photoshop Album really set the standard for these tools.

Now the downside. Forget everything else around it. The creation features ( Album, calender, Web gallery ... ) are worthless ( at best below average ). The main problem is the picture quality. For example, to resize a picture for a web site, the program has to use the right settings for sharpening, smoothing etc. PS Album does a real bad job in this area. Pictures look fuzzy at all sizes and quality settings ( other tools are able to create a brilliant and sharp 50KB resized picture )

The good news is, select you pictures in PS Album ( using the great catalog features ), drag and drop them into a temporary folder and use tools that do the job.

Rating:
Summary: For Organizing or Printing Photos, a Disappointment
Review: Is this the best that Adobe could do? I think that the primary objective of photo album software should be to aid the user in organizing photos. This program does put all your photos into chronological order, and it allows you to easily tag them. But Adobe forces you to adopt their nomenclature of classification: tags built into the program, such as "favorites", "people," "places", "events", and "other" may be good boilerplate suggestions for tag names, but you cannot modify them or delete them, and what's worse, you are forced to classify your photos under those categories. Obviously, Adobe is thinking for those people who'd find it convenient, for example, to crosstag Bill under several places and events. If you've got a couple thousand photos and are searching to find only those photos of Bill at a certain event three years ago, the task is easily accomplished. I like the general idea, but I had hoped to apply the general idea to my own set of categories -- I simply do not think in terms of "people," "places," et cetera. It is true that you can add or delete your own subcategories beneath these built-in tags, but you are stuck with Adobe's generic framework. Adobe could have easily given its users the freedom to create, modify, or delete the boilerplate categories, but they did not.

A secondary, but equally important objective in photo album software, should be to help the user easily print photos. Here again I cannot believe that Adobe is so far from getting it right. For example, if you wish to print a 4x6 photo (a common snapshot size), you are either forced to accept a photo in which the right side of a "landscape" oriented photo is cropped slightly more severely than the left side, or you must accept a photo with a white crop along the left side and bottom, while along the top and right, the image is flush with the edge of the photopaper. Perhaps you can fix this in the "custom" settings, but it is unbelievable that you'd have to experiment with custom settings just to print a standard 4x6 photo.

I'll leave it for other reviewers to discuss this software's capabilities for making slideshows, backup cds, et cetera. But if you're hoping that Adobe Photoshop Album will allow you to either classify your photos using your own categories, or to print a 4x6 photo, be prepared for disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Slow, and Egotistical
Review: Only Adobe would have the gaul to think they could redefine an existing imaging workflow years after it has evolved. I had saved thousands of digital photos and images over the last few years and do you think this product makes it easy to find them? Nope? The entire premise of their organizational paradigm requires that I start over...NOT!

Also, talk about slow! It barely runs on the PC I just bought two years ago....it chugs back the RAM and hangs for minutes at a time.

All I can say is wait for the next version, it can only be better than this...

Rating:
Summary: Great product for ver. 1.0, but needs some improvements
Review: I've been using intensely Adobe Photoshop Album for about a week now, and I squeezed it as much as possible (even obtained some access violation faults with sudden stop of the program). I am very pleased with the program, and I will gladly list the reasons for that:

1. It focuses on stability over features - this product, unlike many others, doesn't give up quality by masquerading a miriad of creepy features inserted just to steal attention (and money) from consumers (but features that don't work well). Adobe Photoshop Album is not a "feature rich" product, but it exhibits an amazing stability for version 1.

2. It is reliable - although not completely bug free (as I said, I was able to make it stop suddenly), it is designed in such a way that you don't lose your work if it stops unexpectedly. Perhaps they save the data after each change; if they do so, they do it with amazing speed - practically seamlessly.

3. It is easy to use - you don't need the manual (which is very basic in explanations). The interface speaks for itself, and everything is under the tip of the mouse pointer.

4. Tagging, searching and sorting is hugely intuitive. The program has some basic tag categories: People, Places, Events and Others.

Do you have a new picture and don't know how to tag it? Just look at it and describe it in plain English. You did 90% of the tagging task - without even knowing.

Example: "Granny is watering the flowers in the garden". Then you should tag it with: Granny (category People), Garden (category Places), Watering (category Events), Flowers (category Other). As simple as emitting sentences while speaking: subject-verb-object/adverbs. Even a child can do it!

If the product is so good, why do I give it only 4 stars? Well, here are the CONs:

1. The automatic sychronization features are inexistent. You *must* use only Adobe Album to manage your photos. If you don't do it, then you may mess up your catalog - without much smart help from Adobe Album.

Example: you install Adobe Album and scan your hard drives. You realize that you have a whole bunch of duplicates (probably produced by some other software).

You decide to remove the duplicates - but the dups remain in Adobe Album catalog, and there's no batch way to remove them from there. Detecting the dups/mismatched entries in the catalog is not automized at all, and this may be a paintakingly difficult process.

If you go to Windows Explorer and remove by hand then you enter another problem: the catalog doesn't synchoronize automatically. Built-in batch support is only for moving photos, but not for deleting.

2. The program is not very versatile when it comes to tags - it keeps them by name only (not by name/category), and moving tags around between categories is quite impossible if you have duplicates. You simply must renounce to one of them - losing all you tagging work with one of the dupes.

3. The slide-show creation feature is primitive and very limiting: only three frame templates are presented, none of them fills the whole TV screen, and the duration of each photos can be only one of 3 pre-set values.

Moreover, the photos must be above a certain (unspecified) resolution. If you choose below that, you are warned about it but not told about what may happen: the programs simply refuses to produce the VCD without a reasonable explanation (you have to figure out yourself that the low resolution is the cause).

4. The program is limited in producing generic slide-shows reusable by other applications (not many applications know how to use PDF-based sildeshow that Adobe Album produces).

Let's say I want to select some photos, then produce a slide-show (like a little movie) that I want to include with some DVD-authoring software into a composite home DVD (containing home movies and home slide shows).

I cannot do that: I must make my selection in Adobe Album, then export the selection as bare JPGs into some directory, then grab my selection from there. Such a waste of steps and disk space!

5. The online help - needed for more unusual tasks - is not very rich and it's sometwhat counter-intuitive. You put some effort into finding what you need.

To summarize: because Adobe Photoshop Album is such a great piece of software but with problems in terms of photo output and integration with other software, I consider a 4 star rating is appropriate.

Rating:
Summary: Great tool
Review: Just got it yesterday and very quickly organized over 1,000 digital photos (4 years worth!) in a single evening. Easy to use and highly recommended. I've used other photo organization tools and this is the best by far.

Rating:
Summary: Exactly what I've been waiting for to manage my photos!
Review: Adobe does it again. Photoshop Album is a worthy Adobe product. It's so intuitive and well-made that it feels like you've used this product before. Perfect for managing your photos and creating photobased projects! Love the slide show feature (better than MS Plus! Photo Story--in implementation). Of course being version 1.0, there are some areas where things can be more polished (like thumbnail redraw performance). Great job Adobe!

Rating:
Summary: Category Hierarchy much too limiting
Review: Upon trying this software I discovered that the keyword tag ability - the highlight of the program - is rather crippled by the fact that you can only have 3 levels of category, and Adobe won't let you change the top one (People, Events, Places, Other.) You can add subcategories to those (only one level) and then tags inside them. You can NOT make arbitrary category nesting many levels deep. For anyone who wants to really categorize things thoroughly, this is a severe limitation in what should have been the best feature. I'm disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Freeze Out
Review: Just received my copy of PhotoAlbum yesterday, and immediately went to install. As of this morning, I've unistalled and reinstalled 4 times. It will not acknowledge my registration (done 4 times now). Program will not even allow me to by-pass this redundant registration process, because then it freezes up EVERY SINGLE TIME! Went to Adobe's website to get tech support--HA! Even though I have several Adobe products, and have registered each one, the website will not let me access the online tech support because it claims not to "recognize" my login despite numerous attempts. Now I can't even return this POS. Not Amazon's fault, I know. But now I've just spent $50 for something completely unusable to me.

Rating:
Summary: If you have Photoshop 7.0, you still need this
Review: What a great piece of software! It's simple to use and makes organization a breeze. You must use it to believe it. The adjustment portion of the software is basic, but that's all many will ever need. I use Photoshop 7.0 and can simply drag photos from Album into it after locating them.
There's no more endless searching for photos.
Look under the proper category or subcategory, or date, and Album will show you thumbnails of all that have been tagged.
It's easy to tag them too.
It may take a little time to tag your existing photos, if you have thousands as I do. But download your photos through Album and you will organize them as you go.
It's one of the best buys I have seen in a long time. If you do digital, you need Adobe Photoshop Album.

Rating:
Summary: Photoshop Album disappointing
Review: ...I expect quality products from Adobe, and was eager to play with this tool. It was a disappointing experience. The menus were clumsy, performance was slow, the editing features were primitive, and it didn't watch folders to detect new images. I thought it was bloated and awkward...It appears I will stick with FotoAlbum...and PhotoshopElements (an outstanding Adobe product). After tinkering with Picasa, NikonView, FujiFinePix, KodakEasyShare, OlympusCamediaMaster, and PhotoshopAlbum, FotoAlbum is my favorite. It has the features I want at the perfect price.