PhotoShop Album
Software Review by RipYarnallUnless you have already purchased it (in which case you probably would not be reading this) Adobe’s Photoshop Album is the digital image organizer for which you should have been waiting. It arranges your photos without moving them from their original locations and, linking automatically to Photoshop Elements 2.0, provides virtually all the tweaking you could possibly want for your digital photos.
Before we go into more detail let’s cover the modest system requirements for Photoshop Album:
Intel ® Pentium III or 4 processor
Microsoft ® Windows ® 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, or Windows XP
128 MB of RAM (256 MB recommended)
250 MB of available hard-disk space
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 (with Service Pack 2), 5.5, or 6.0 (updated with applicable service packs)
Color Monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors at a resolution of 800x600
CD-ROM drivePhotoshop Album finds the pictures you tell it to look for and brings information about each photo (but not the photo itself) into what it calls the catalog. That is where the program keeps information such as file location and format. You can then view and adjust all your digital images in one location even though the actual image files remain in their original location..
Once all your pictures are represented in the catalog, where the program automatically sorts them by date, it’s time to assert the real organizing power of Photoshop Album and begin tagging your photos. The tagged photos (and multiple tags are acceptable for both tagging and retrieving) allow you to look at your shots grouped in categories of your choice. Your digital images are displayed one at a time or in your choice of groups of various sized thumbnails in the main portion of the screen, which Adobe calls the Photo Well.
The program provides several default categories (for which tags can be placed on your digital images): People, Places, Events and Other. Of course you can create virtually as many of your own sub-categories as you like. The tags are used as filters to retrieve, from your entire collection, only files in the categories you select. How hard is it to tag your photos? It’s as easy as click, drag and drop. Just click on a tag, drag it over to your picture and drop it there. The same tag can be dropped simultaneously to multiple selected photos.
Another way Photoshop Album lets you find your photo files is by date. Across the top of the screen is a time line with bar graphs indicating how many pictures you have from that date. You can also go to Calendar View and click on individual days.
You can crop, remove red eye, and adjust the overall color, contrast and brightness of a photo on the spot in Photoshop Album. For more sophisticated editing tools you can jump to Photoshop Elements (assuming you have it installed) or any other image-editing application on your computer.
Photoshop Album also offers what Adobe calls “Creations”. You can use your photos and video clips to make albums, slideshows, video CDs, greeting cards, calendars, eCards photo books and web sites.
A superabundance of redundancy of the controls makes the Getting Started guide a little dense, but if you have ever had to hunt blindly through hundreds (or thousands) of files for a digital image whose name you have forgotten, you will quickly welcome this application to your system. Adobe Photoshop Album makes it easy and fun to bring order out of chaos and organize your digital pictures.
Adobe Photoshop Album
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA95110-2704
MSRP: $99.00 US
Return to Review Listing 2004