Struggling to manage your ever-growing collection of digital photos? Read our Australian review of Microsoft's solution to the problem.Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9 combines two imaging applications, MS Digital Image Library 9, which acts as an organiser for your photos and MS Digital Image Pro 9, which is a photo manipulation program. The installation size of the whole suite varies from about 400MB to 1.3GB, depending on the amount of templates and sample images you choose to install.
When you first open Digital Image Library, a wizard launches to find all the photos you want the application to manage. It scans your hard drive and returns folders it considers photo folders and you can deselect folders that are not appropriate. The library acts as a database for your pictures rather than a storage location; it won't change the file structure or move your photos.
Once you have imported your pictures the library presents an Explorer-like interface with a folder pane on the left and the image browser (in thumbnails) on the right. The pane on the left can changed via the view menu so you browse photos by dates and keywords as well as through file folders.
When you take a photo on a digital camera the resulting picture file often contains metadata such as shutter speed and the date/time the photo was taken. Digital Image Library allows you to add to this metadata with captions, keywords and a rating.
To assign a rating you simply click on how many stars (out of five) you want to assign each photo in the preview pane. From here you can also add the keywords and captions that apply to each photo or a selection of photos.
Double-clicking a photo brings it up in a full-screen view where there are a couple of basic controls such as zoom, fit to screen, rotate and print. You can also select a set of thumbnails to show in a slideshows. The transition between photos is smooth, and a speed from one second to one minute can be set for each to display.
Click on the edit button and Digital Image Pro 9 launches and opens the selected image, ready to retouch. While not as intense as Adobe Photoshop, Image Pro 9 gives novice users an easy-to-use graphics tool to touch up photos, add special effects and edit multiple pictures.
Five instructional videos are included to explain the workspace and take users through both basic and advanced photo retouching. The help file is extensive and contains links to online photography resources such as ninemsn's Photos Web site.
There are many retouching tools users can apply to photos in need of a quick fix. The red eye tool and Smart Erase are handy ways to clean up photos, both of which work well. If any distractions are in a photo, you can freehandedly trace around it and apply Smart Erase to fill the selected area with the colours and textures from surrounding areas.
Microsoft Photo Story Lite is an add-on to the suite that allows you to turn your photos into video. You can choose which photos to include then narrate these if you have a microphone and add music and zooming effects. It is a straightforward process which makes it easy to save your photo story in the windows media video (WMV) file format and to burn the video to CD.
There is a plethora of templates to use as the basis of various projects including cards, calendars, labels, flyers and awards. For instance, about 50 templates exist for awards alone and span across themes such as business, community, family and school.
Graphic designers and professional retouchers will find Digital Image Pro's guided tasks irritating and it is unlikely to convert them from Photoshop, the industry standard. However, Photoshop is overkill for most home users and it's interface can be daunting for beginners.
Microsoft Digital Image Suite is fairly pricey but if you are looking for an easy way to classify your growing stack of digital pictures, you might want to invest in this software.
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9
Company: Microsoft Australia
Price: AU$269.95
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 13 20 58
