Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 Review What To Do After You Take the Picture Eric Grevstad
Mon 5/12/03 -- A company famous for its first-class image-editing program expands the brand with an image-management utility or toolkit for organizing, finding, touching up, and sharing shots from your digital-camera collection. Despite The Matrix Reloaded opening this week, there's no need to say, "Whoa, deja vu": This may sound like Adobe Systems' Photoshop Album, reviewed here in March, but it's also Paint Shop Photo Album from Jasc Software, maker of Paint Shop Pro.
In fact, Paint Shop Photo Album ($49 boxed, $45 download) has a longer history than Adobe's entry in the booming thumbnail-browsing and red-eye-fixing arena; it's version 4 of the program formerly known as After Shot. And between its well-polished interface and deft borrowing of some sophisticated Paint Shop Pro editing features, it's an excellent option for anyone trying to keep track of the PC equivalent of a desk drawer full of drugstore photo envelopes.
Every Folder Tells a Story
At first glance, Paint Shop Photo Album looks like an ordinary file manager with a folder or directory tree at the left and a pane for previewing zoomable single images or any of three sizes of thumbnails at the right. The program refers to folders as albums; if you use it to download images from your digital camera, it stores them in an album bearing today's date by default.
However, the normal browsing view is only one option. Tabs along the left of the screen let you examine file information, adding a title and description or seeing the image data stored by your camera, or switch to a customizable tree of nested keywords (such as Weddings, then Steve and Joyce, then Receiving Line or Reception) and check boxes. The latter make it easy to tag or classify images by photographer, location, subject, or whatever. You can search for images across folders using either keywords or combinations of album and image names or descriptions.
Handy everyday features include group renaming of cryptically numbered digital-camera shots -- renaming a dozen images as Backyard Party 001, Backyard Party 002, and so on. If you want to share your shots with friends or family, you can upload them to Shutterfly or a similar online service; create an e-mail message with automatically downsized, modem-friendly attachments; or turn a group of images into an on-screen slide show with an MP3 or WAV soundtrack plus simple display-time, transition, and title-screen options, then turn the show into a Video CD for playback in DVD decks.
Paint Shop Photo Album also excels at printing images, with a long list of print templates ranging from contact sheets to 8 by 10's or wallet-size. After you choose a template, you can drag images onto it in any order you desire, choosing whether to rotate or shrink each one to fit its allotted space and adding headers, footers, and captions as you like.
