Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Missing Key Features
Although this product might be of use to the very casual photographer with a small number of images to manage, it lacks two critical features that any one with more than a few-hundred locally stored photos will sorely miss: (1) no support for networked files without local caching and (2) no support for exporting catalog data. The lack of the first feature means that a local copy is made of each image you wish to index in Photoshop Album (not a good thing if you have several thousand images stored on a network!) and the lack of the second means that all of your data is trapped in Photoshop Album and is unavailable for use in other applications.Wait for version 2.0 or look elsewhere.
Rating: - Photoshop Album - Beware
I bought this product as a companion to Photoshop Elements 2.0.
Album is one of the most bug-ridden products I have ever used.
By contrast, Elements works very well. For a view of the types of bugs in Album, go to the Adobe web site, then navigate to discussion group under support for Album. You will find nearly 600 inputs, with mostly complaints and "see if this works" work-arounds for bugs. Far too many to list here. Album did not load on my desktop using WIn 98 2nd edition. I was told to look through the 600 user complaints to find a solution. It was there, but it took quite a bit of time. My notebook with Win XP installed ok, but would not boot up without yet another visit to the user's work-around pages. Product does not support some scanner formats (Visioneer). I was told to convert these formats to pdf so they would be recognized by Album.Consider other options than this software. It was not ready for release. Adobe usually releases good products. Not this time.
Rating:  - Fabulous software for managing digital images
Adobe Photoshop Album is, in a word, fabulous. First it helps you in finding all your photos. A Photoshop Album catalog can, according to the included Readme document, contain up to 50,000 images (if you need to catalog more pictures, my hat is off to you -- but don't worry as you can create multiple catalogs). You can tell it to simply scan an entire drive for images, or you can use the enhanced routines to collect photos from your hard disk, digital camera, scanner, or CD.Once Adobe Photoshop Album knows where your pictures are, you can begin cataloging them. Adobe's software engineers have made a forward leap in "ease of use" by converting a sophisticated keyword database into a simple drag and drop tagging system. The tags are simple (and dare I say fun?) to make. Once built, they can be effortlessly drag-and-dropped into one or many photos. Images can have as many tags as you need. Since the tags use tiny photo-image icons (that you can select and edit -- hence the 'fun') you can see at a glance which one you're looking for. The tagging system is cool to use and very functional. After an image is tagged and dated, finding pictures becomes a dream come true. Want to seek out pictures of a person? Just click the box by their tag. Want to find all the pictures of your kids at grandma's house? Assuming you've created and added the right tags, just click-click. Want to find all the pictures taken during the week of a vacation? Just use the on-screen timeline, or even a very-familiar looking calendar interface. (The fact that the calendar interface looks like a nice wall calendar is indicative of how much work Adobe's team put into the user interface). Although it shines at digital image cataloging, the software fell a bit short when it was time to catalog my collection of scanned images. There are no tags or shortcuts for dating photos. Since I wanted to change the picture's catalog date from the file date (i.e, when I scanned it) to the actual date (when it was taken), I had to go through a fairly cumbersome series of mouse clicks. Some of the super-usability shown in the tagging system could have gone into dating photos. Adobe Photoshop Album includes a decent set of editing tools. You can select a variety of "one click fixes" to sharpen the image or adjust levels. There are other tools for more controlled adjustments, such as brightness and contrast sliders, and hue and saturation sliders. I will say these basic tools are very well implemented, and you can make a basic fix -- say, crop, brighten and sharpen -- extremely quickly. If you need more fine control, Adobe Photoshop Album works well with Adobe Photoshop Elements (and, I am sure, Photoshop itself). I presume it can be set to work with other photo editors. Beyond cataloging, Photoshop Album offers a set of tools to share the images through email, slideshows, photo albums. The email option works only with Hotmail and Outlook Express, which is unfortunate for Netscape, Mozilla and Eudora users. It can even burn video CDs. As well as printing your photos, it will help you create and print greeting cards and calendars as well. Finally you can share photos using something called Adobe Atmosphere Gallery. The last is an impressive, if rather bizarre, tool to put your images up on the virtual walls of a virtual 3-D gallery. Adobe Photoshop album offers an easy link to printing your photos through an online service. However, although right now the only service the program offers me is Shutterfly. Since I use Ofoto, I'll go ahead and keep uploading photos the old-fashioned way. Adobe Photoshop album will back up your photos onto CD-R, CD-RW or DVD, which is probably good for people who don't otherwise back up their photo collection. In fact, given it's ability to work with digital cameras and scanners, email and the Web, your printer and online printing services, and CDs and DVD's, Adobe Photoshop Album could honestly be the only photo software you need. Users who want greater editing resources will need a more powerful imaging program, but this software can certainly do everything else. If possible, I probably would have given Adobe Photoshop Album four and a half stars. With a large collection of scanned family photos, dating them for inclusion in the catalog is an unnecessarily tedious chore. However, the software is exceptional in all other respects and I was happy to round up instead of down. A fine, fine program.
|
