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Album software organizes the photos strewn on your hard drive
06/05/2003
Digital photography was supposed to rid American households of that shoe box of unsorted family snapshots inhabiting our closets and cupboards. But, as many consumers are learning, an unorganized computer hard drive with digi-photos strewn across dozens of folders and subfolders is no less frustrating and unsightly. Pictures get lost. Even when you find them, the camera has given them gibberish names. ("Was P100022.jpg the wedding picture of my wife or a shot of Buffy the bulldog?") Sure, these cameras let you click away without worrying about film rolls and photo-finishing charges. But when it gets down to culling good from bad on the hard drive, more isn't necessarily better. As more cellphones, PDAs and other devices are built with digital cameras, the proliferation of images inside the home computer threatens to get worse, fast. It's not a pretty picture. At first, only the pros had the right tools. Big software bundles such as Adobe Photoshop were adept at touching up and archiving, but their mechanics were daunting for novices. Professional imaging software was also expensive. The newest members of the digerati wished for something simpler and more direct. "Just let me create a slide show," they said. "How about one button I can push to get rid of that dreaded red-eye in flash shots?" And "Why can't I create a simple database of the stuff downloaded from my camera?" In the last year, these questions have finally been answered with ingeniously innovative, low-cost software packages. For Windows, Adobe Systems has stripped down its Photoshop program, added some powerful tools and produced a full-service, customizable picture organizer called Adobe Photoshop Album. Another company, Lifescape Solutions, has developed Picasa, a cheaper option that automates archiving almost as well. Both are gathering kudos and design awards. For Macintosh machines, iPhoto2 expands archiving by allowing users to quickly move photo libraries to CDs and DVDs, and add music to slide shows. There's no doubt that iPhoto2 is a cornerstone of Apple CEO Steve Job's vision of the home computer as a "digital hub." Although simple and intuitive, it doesn't have the key feature of the newest versions of Adobe Photoshop Album and Picasa. Adobe and Picasa introduce a novel way to glance through electronic photos. The programs search your hard drive for all picture files, then the software comes up with a time line of your photographic activity. With Adobe Photoshop Album, the time line appears at the top of the software interface. Slide forward and back, and thumbnail images of pictures taken on various dates can be viewed in the pane below. The time line appears as a bar graph, so you can quickly scan for pictures from the summer vacation, Christmas and birthdays. Picasa takes a slightly different tack. When it searches your hard drive for images, it clumps them into groups organized by date, then uses a spiffy three-dimensional interface to give you access. Using your cursor, you roll through the groups, which are displayed as icons. As you move from one to another, the software shows you a half-tone of the first image from each album. Click on any icon, and you start a slide show of the contents. Adobe's time line rendition is more user-friendly. Thumbnails are larger and crisper than Picasa's. And Picasa, when it searches the hard drive, comes up with unwanted image files, including those saved from Web pages and software applications. You may have to delete dozens of unwanted images from the database before getting down to work. On the other hand, Picasa's clean, uncluttered interface may appeal to novices. Both Adobe Photoshop Album and Picasa allow quick retouches, eliminating red-eye, and balancing colors and brightness. However, Adobe's product performs these tasks more adeptly and with more options. Picasa's quick-retouch efforts sometimes don't help at all. Beyond that, Adobe's organizer allows users to create text "tags" for single shots or whole batches of images. Adding descriptors ("My wife at the wedding") lets you use keyword searches ("wife" or "wedding") to get the images you want for slide shows, calendars or CD or DVD archives. Adobe Photoshop Album also lets you rename pictures from within the software; Picasa does not. Macintosh owners will find iPhoto2, the latest free software from Apple, worth the download. There's no time line feature, but iPhoto2 allows pros and novices to organize, share and manipulate photos. The latest version adds a one-click Enhance button and a precise Retouch brush. Slide shows can use soundtracks imported right from iTunes. And templates, including proof sheets and greeting cards, allow users to get the most from expensive printing paper. Like Adobe's product, Apple includes the ability to add keywords to each image, making searches a snap. |
Adobe Photoshop Album
iPhoto2