Adobe Photoshop Album Review Picture This, and This, and That, and These, and Those Eric Grevstad
Mon 3/24/03 -- You can manage a growing collection of digital photos with Windows Explorer. You can also ask a sixth-grader to do your taxes.
Windows' own file manager offers a couple of ways to sort and show thumbnail previews of graphics files, but let's get real -- if you have any hope of ever finding or using any of the digital-camera pictures, scanned photos, or downloaded Windows wallpapers you collect, tossing them all into a generic "My Pictures" folder is as dumb as keeping all your applications' data files in a single "My Documents" ... er ... it's pretty dumb. Unless you want your digital camera and PC to be as useful as a shoebox full of random mystery snapshots, you need a more flexible and far-reaching way to organize images.
Graphics software giant Adobe Systems is far from the first to offer an image-previewing, -retrieving, -retouching, and -publishing program, and a grinch might grumble that the name Adobe Photoshop Album is a slightly misleading move to link the company's friendly, $50 consumer utility to its formidable, $600-plus professional image editor. But if you need a neat, easy-to-use, and versatile way to organize images and turn them into output projects -- ranging from simple printouts and e-mail attachments to fancy albums and Web slide shows -- Photoshop Album is a terrific find.
Thumbnails At Your Fingertips
Probably our only complaint about Photoshop Album -- apart from the warning that it's definitely happier on high-performance PCs; the program was decidedly slow on a Pentium III desktop with the minimum 128MB of memory -- is half a compliment: The interface offers two or more ways to accomplish most tasks, from toolbars on the main screen to pull-down or right-click menus to the alternate "quick guide" menu that greets beginners by default.
In addition to importing images from digital cameras, memory cards, or scanners, the program can perform an inventory of all images (JPG, BMP, PNG, nonanimated GIF, RGB TIFF, and Photoshop PSD formats) and digital video clips already on your PC's hard disk. Its main screen shows a single-image or one of three sizes of thumbnail views of your image collection, either in its entirety or filtered (more on that in a moment), with toolbar buttons for editing, printing, e-mailing, ordering Shutterfly online prints, and other tasks along the top.
Even before you enter any search criteria, Photoshop Album organizes your images chronologically, with a timeline indicating months when you took lots of digital pictures or just a few. You can click on a month to see the images created then, or drill down to a calendar view that lets you peruse the pictures you took each day. (This on-screen, calendar-based browsing is separate from the option to choose pictures and templates for printing a variety of handsome calendars -- or greeting cards, photo albums, and so forth.)
