Take Charge Of Your Digital Photos

May 21, 2003

Adobe Photoshop Album (Windows 98SE/2000/XP with Pentium III, $49.99.) offers a straight-forward, sensible way to manage, access and share your digital photos and videos. With this program you can dig out from that avalanche of digital photos filling your hard drive, find any photo easily and quickly, identify your photos with names other than P0003462.jpg and much more.

The first time you run the program, it searches all hard drives for photos, videos and audio files (this might take a while, depending on your collection). You can also have the program search for media files on removable storage devices, such as ZIP discs, CD-ROMs and flash memory cards, and download photos directly from digital cameras or scanners. Most picture, video and music formats are supported, including jpeg, tiff, bmp, gif, avi, mpeg, mov, mp3 and wav. After finding these files, each is indexed, and a thumbnail is placed in the "Well" for viewing in either small, medium or large size. The "Well" is what the program calls an entire catalogued collection. You can have as many catalogs as you want, so it’s easy to create separate family, business or special events catalogs. The original media files are left untouched where they were found.

The program sorts all the pictures and videos in the Well by the date of their creation, using the EXIF (exchangeable image file) data that many digital cameras record in the file along with the picture itself. If this data is not available due to an older digital camera or scanned pictures, the program uses the windows file creation date. You can have the sort list newest or oldest date first. The date sort is the default, but other sort options are available, such as by batch, i.e., each imported batch of photos is separated by a screen marker showing where the batch was imported from and the date. Or sort by "color similarities." Here you choose a picture or two whose overall coloration you’d like to have other photos match. How is that for cool?

You can find pictures in the Well by moving a time line slider to the desired year and month. A vertical bar graph proportional to the number of pictures for each month is shown, with thumbnails of pictures from that month at the top of the Well display. You can also use the calendar view, which is similar to a wall calendar, to display a specific year and month and then click on a specific day. Days that include pictures are indicated by a thumbnail of the first photo of the group dated that day. More cool.

Keeping track of your most wanted pictures is done by tagging them with, of course, Tags. This requires a bit of work on your part, but is much easier to do in Adobe Photoshop Album than other photo organizing programs--and the rewards of being able to instantly find any photo are well worth the effort. The program starts you off with a set of default Tags: Favorites, People (with sub-categories of Family and Friends), Places, Events, Others and Hidden. Pictures with the Hidden tag will not be displayed in the Show All view of the Well.

You can add more tags as categories or subcategories, as many as you need. Tagging a picture is as easy as dragging and dropping the tag onto the picture. You can attach one, several or no tags to any single picture. Then when you want to see all the pictures of, say, your children during your Disneyland 2002 vacation, just select the tags "children" and "Disneyland 2002 vacation," and only the thumbnails with those tags are shown--instantly. Or you could also use the time line or calendar to select the date(s) of your vacation. Or use the batch sort to select the dates of your vacation picture download. You can add captions and notes to each picture and, best yet, search for specific words in the caption or note fields. These multiple easy ways of quickly finding pictures make this program very useful, but there’s even more. Read on.

You can edit pictures in the program to crop or to correct brightness, contrast, color balance and remove red-eye. The edited picture is saved separately from the original. Or link directly from the program to Photoshop Elements or Photoshop (both sold separately) for more involved editing. Using Adobe Photoshop Album, you can include any sub-set of your pictures in a work area to create a variety of shows and displays. You can easily create slide shows that can be saved as a PDF (portable document file) format and played on any computer running Acrobat Reader (free from Adobe) or burn a Video CD directly from the program. The Video CD will play on most newer DVD players. We had a great time creating and playing a slide show from photos of children taken during a school open house.

Using the slide show editor, you can arrange the pictures in any order and add background music (several music cuts are supplied), captions, titles and cool transitions. Additionally, you can print one or several pictures in various formats and

create photo albums, greeting cards or calendars to print, an e-card for sending and even a bound photo book (ordered from an on-line supplier).

Using the CD burning capabilities, you can make that all- important backup of your photo collections on CD-R or DVD-R. Extensive help is available from an on-line user manual.

Adobe Photoshop Album is a well-designed, easy-to-use program that’s a welcome addition to the world of digital photography. We recommend it highly.

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