This is a powerful photo manager, but you should think twice about buying it unless you already use Adobe's line of graphics products.
This AU$99 photo manager skilfully sorts the images scattered around your hard drive and catalogues them in an easy-to-browse format that becomes more useful as your collection grows. Although we found the program truly helpful, it's best for photographers who already own other Adobe programs. Many other software companies (Jasc, for example) offer their own photo managers with similar toolsets, and there are countless free, downloadable programs that will do the job just fine -- although perhaps not as artfully.
Slide in the installation CD, follow the prompts, and Adobe places all the relevant files on your machine. Our installation went smoothly, but it certainly didn't go quickly. To its credit, Adobe makes an effort to entertain you by rotating helpful tips for using the program on the installation screen.
The first time you launch Album, the Quick Guide window greets you with several options for importing your photos and media files. Click the Get Photos tab to scan your entire hard drive (you can choose to search just specific drives or specific folders), and in a matter of seconds, you'll see a search window full of all the folders containing photos and media files. Can't remember which files you stored where? Just check the Preview box to take a quick glimpse of the files in each folder, and then choose to either import all your folders or to individually add them to your catalogue. In our tests, Adobe effortlessly grabbed all our photos (around 100) in one go.
After you've imported your photos, Album files them by date taken and tucks them into the main My Catalog window for easy searching, browsing and sharing. The My Catalog window consists of three main sections. At the very top of the window, you'll see the Timeline, which shows you the span of months and years your catalogue contains (click the colour-coded bars to view images from that month). Underneath the Timeline, the Photo Well gives you access to every single photo on your system, as well as tools for making global changes to batches of photos, such as changing the import history. The Tags window, which lets you quickly sort your images based on additional info you input, sits to the left of the Well. Put together, the interface is well organised, easy to use and brimming with powerful tools.
Photoshop Album's mantra is ‘find, fix, share, preserve´. You can browse your library by using the nifty Timeline, sifting through the Calendar view, or searching by filename or import date via the Find menu option. Want more refined searching for quick cross-referencing? Plug in info about People, Places and Events with Abode's tagging system. It's simple: just go to the Tag menu, click the New Tag icon, add your info and drag and drop the tag onto the photos associated with it.
Although it's clearly no Photoshop (or even Picture It), Album does include basic tools for cleaning up problem shots. Select a picture from the Photo Well, click the Fix tab, and with one click you can remove red-eye, adjust brightness and contrast, modify lighting, crop out trouble spots, and fix colour saturation. If you end up mucking up your photos even more, you can restore the originals at any time. Adobe also includes four one-click editing tools -- Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Sharpen -- that are especially handy for newcomers who are unsure of how to tweak bad shots.
With Album, Adobe is undoubtedly de-emphasising editing in favour of sharing tools. You can create video CDs, greeting cards, e-cards, calendars, and Web-friendly galleries in just a few clicks in the Creations Wizard. And if you own Photoshop Elements, you can export your photos and Creations into that program to add text and fun effects. Don't have a high-quality photo printer yet? You can easily order prints from online services from within the program. Most of us like to email favourite shots along to friends and family, and to make it easier, Album automatically resizes photos so that they don't end up clogging your friends' in-boxes.
By the way, are we the only ones who are anxious about having all of our precious photos stored in one place? Fortunately for the paranoid photographer, Adobe includes tools for backing up photos online or to removable media.
Overall, we are impressed by the speed and skill of Album's search functionality, and the tagging tool worked flawlessly in our tests. The program has a smart search tool, too: we were able to call up queries both simple and complex. However, in addition to the aforementioned clunky installation, we occasionally experienced some delays when using Album's editing features. A few times, while adjusting composition, our test system slowed considerably.
Adobe has long offered excellent support, and the system for Photoshop Album is no exception. The built-in help is terrific, with well-written FAQs, complete with helpful screenshots. At the time of writing, Adobe hadn't started shipping Album yet, so we couldn't find any online FAQs or support phone numbers.
Company: Adobe Australia
Price: AU$99
Release date: End of February 2003
Phone: 1300 550 305
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Love the article, it's very helpful to me in deciding what to buy. From what this article says, I can kind of assume this, but I do have to ask one question about the functions of backing up photos online or to removable media: Does the software remember exactly what CD I have a certain photo on, even if it's not on my computer anymore? And if so, does it still keep a thumbnail of it? This feature is really important to me, because I can't store all of my 10's of thousands of photos on my computer or even an external hard drive. I'd like to tag all my photos on removable media so I can find them later, easily, and preview what they look like without having to have a print made up of each photo. Thanks for the info, very helpful.