Editors' Rating
Published: 07 Oct 2003
Last year's Photoshop Album debut was less than thrilling. Although the software skilfully sorted images, performance problems bogged it down. But for version 2.0, Adobe has cleared out the junk to deliver a much better program for organising and sharing digital photos and video clips.
Just as before, Photoshop Album automatically nabs all the shots on your hard drive and organises them chronologically. It can also create and track proxy thumbnails of pictures stored on removable media, such as CDs. You can browse your library by clicking a month in the Timeline or sifting through the revamped Calendar. Album also records your management actions and lets you search by events in your photos' history. For example, to call up everything you've sent to a Web photofinisher, you simply select Find > By History > Items Ordered Online.
For more precise sorting, Adobe's tagging system lets you enter detailed information about your shots. For example, let's say you've just uploaded a bunch of pictures from your son Charlie's birthday party. To make them all easily identifiable, you can create the new keywords ‘Charlie’ and ‘birthday’, then drag them onto the whole batch. New to version 2.0 is the ability to email tags along with photos, so your friends and family can benefit from all your hard organisational work. However, although you can quickly view metadata, you still can't search it.
All of the first version's basic editing tools remain in Album 2.0. Auto Color, Auto Levels, Auto Contrast and Sharpen are one-click fixes that are especially handy for newcomers who aren't sure how to tweak bad pictures. You can also modify lighting, crop out trouble spots, and use sliders to adjust colour saturation.
Once you've cleaned up your shots, you have plenty of ways to share them. With the Creations Wizard, just a few clicks can produce a video CD, a greeting card, an e-card, a calendar or a Web-friendly gallery. Mobile phones, Palm OS handhelds and compatible TiVo digital video recorders can now accept your Album pictures. Adobe has also added more templates and bumped up the maximum resolution for video CDs. And should your computer crash, Album's built-in backup function will safeguard you from losing everything.
Although the improvements aren't mind-blowing, they're incredibly thoughtful and well executed. With its more streamlined interface, Album is now a tight ship. For digital-photo enthusiasts, Photoshop Album 2.0 is a welcome productivity boon: a tool that both organises images and maximises the options for enjoying them.
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