Summary: Stacking Up Adobe and Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook
Comment: Adobe Photo Album's advantage is its ability to catalog photos. However, I think that more and more people are beginning to look for the ability to organize photos with other files like words and music. For ease of use and ability to link photo with titles, text, songs and songs, the newly release Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook wins hands down.
[...]I want software like Adobe to go beyond generic photo organizing capabilities. I'm looking to the new generation of software like Memories that can handle all sorts of multimedia and is very easy to use
Customer Rating:
Summary: Annoying program to work with
Comment: There are two annoying aspects of this software that prevent me from recommending it:
First, it uses a great deal of system memory - more than any other program on my computer. The program often freezes as a result. Even when it doesn't, it can be maddeningly slow.
Second, the way the tags are laid out, it's very easy to accidentally check a tag box while dragging that tag onto a photo. Result - the group of photos you're working on disappears, as the program executes a search on that tag. Very annoying and time consuming. This happened to me so often that I can't believe it wasn't caught in the development process.
In short, this program is less than what it should be, and definitely not what I needed to organize my photo collection.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great product if not be used to create VCD/DVD
Comment: This is a nice product with pretty interface, feature like tagging are useful.
One big drawback is that it cannot create DVD. Even for VCD, it cannot create >100 photos in one VCD. (It adds a lot of junk in the VCD, and computer runs extremely slow and fulfill all the CD).
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Good and the Not So Good
Comment: The Good: A great way to organize photos. I have more than 5000 photos cataloged, a combination of scanned pictures, and photos taken with a digital camera. Also, the software is very quick and quite good at fixing minor photo problems such as lighting and color (and red eye). Almost all my scanned photos were greatly improved by using these one-click adjustments. For image retouching and more advanced editing, the software allows you to easily link to other software you may have such as PhotoShop or PS Elements.
The Not So Good: Do not try to restructure your photos and their respective directories after importing and cataloging your photos using Album -- it's a pain to re-link the images. Also, thumbnails get out of sync and it can become confusing. Another disappointment is the software's ability to create video slide shows for DVD players. Very few options -- you cannot choose more than one piece of music, and if you want "high quality" images, you cannot have any music or transitions. There also does not appear to be a way to determine how many images you can place on a CD. When I place a hundred or so images in a slide show, I seem to be okay. But when I tried to place 280 in a slide show, I received a write error during the burn process. I would like to see the slide show features significantly beefed up in future versions.
Bottom line is I have now become dependent on the software for finding photos quickly, and at this, it does a very good job. With more robust options for creating video slide shows, it would be a great product.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I love this software
Comment: I had the first version too and with the rebate decided to go ahead and upgrade.
Like many people I have a couple of digital cameras and have had them for 3 years. I have built up about 2500+ pictures and was having a hard time storing them with just a standard file system. PS Album changes all of that. It will allow you to create tags for all of your pictures allowing you to easily search for the picture you want.
As example I just went to my brother's wedding and took about 160 pics. If I want to find a picture of my grandmother there rather than having to look at all 160 of them I just choose two tags - "Jeff's Wedding and Grandmother" and it brings up all three pictures of grandmother at the wedding.
Now you do have to tag your pictures, and it probably took me about 2 weeks when I first got the software to tag all of my old pictures. However if you do it as you go it is very quick and intuitive. And it makes finding a few pictures so much easier if you have a lot of them like I do.
My machine is decent but not great. I have a P4 1.6 Ghz with 640 MB Ram. I have no problems what so ever browsing up all of my pictures at once. Most of them were taken with a 5 MP camera and average about 1.5 MB a piece. However as you browse them you are only looking at thumbprints and so it is really pretty quick.
To summarize this software is very easy to use and I wouldn't want to be without it.