Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop Album [Old Version]

This software is fantastic. It does a great job of cataloging your digital image collection. I have nearly 5500 digital images on 6 CDR's back to 1999. I love the ability of the software to create a thumbnail (proxy they call it) on the PC, while leaving the original image on the CDR. If I want to export, print or work with the original image, the software prompts me and tells me what CDR it is on! The ability to tag files is incredible. The more effort you put into tagging the files, the better the softwares searches become later. I tagged each of my nearly 5500 files with the people that were in them, the occasion they were taken for AND the location they were taken in (when it was relevant). It took me a total of about 14 hours to go back over my 5500 images since 1999. It is truly an amazing product.

Is this the best that Adobe could do? I think that the primary objective of photo album software should be to aid the user in organizing photos. This program does put all your photos into chronological order, and it allows you to easily tag them. But Adobe forces you to adopt their nomenclature of classification: tags built into the program, such as "favorites", "people," "places", "events", and "other" may be good boilerplate suggestions for tag names, but you cannot modify them or delete them, and what's worse, you are forced to classify your photos under those categories. Obviously, Adobe is thinking for those people who'd find it convenient, for example, to crosstag Bill under several places and events. If you've got a couple thousand photos and are searching to find only those photos of Bill at a certain event three years ago, the task is easily accomplished. I like the general idea, but I had hoped to apply the general idea to my own set of categories -- I simply do not think in terms of "people," "places," et cetera. It is true that you can add or delete your own subcategories beneath these built-in tags, but you are stuck with Adobe's generic framework. Adobe could have easily given its users the freedom to create, modify, or delete the boilerplate categories, but they did not.

A secondary, but equally important objective in photo album software, should be to help the user easily print photos. Here again I cannot believe that Adobe is so far from getting it right. For example, if you wish to print a 4x6 photo (a common snapshot size), you are either forced to accept a photo in which the right side of a "landscape" oriented photo is cropped slightly more severely than the left side, or you must accept a photo with a white crop along the left side and bottom, while along the top and right, the image is flush with the edge of the photopaper. Perhaps you can fix this in the "custom" settings, but it is unbelievable that you'd have to experiment with custom settings just to print a standard 4x6 photo.

I'll leave it for other reviewers to discuss this software's capabilities for making slideshows, backup cds, et cetera. But if you're hoping that Adobe Photoshop Album will allow you to either classify your photos using your own categories, or to print a 4x6 photo, be prepared for disappointment.

I've tried a few of the other digital picture organization programs, and I must say this is the best one so far. I really like being able to easily send my photos to friends. It also has great integration with online ordering. And it fits in great with other adobe products, fixing up your digital images with photoshop, and sharing with pdf. And if you don't have photoshop, there is basic image fix up, like taking out red eyes, built in. But the best part of album is how easy it is to use. Everything just makes perfect sense, I got up and running using advanced options without even using the help buttons. It's definitely the easiest to use digital picture organizer out there.

Flipping through the reviews of this program I've seen a lot of negative reviews so I was compelled to write a positive one detailing my experiences with it.

First of all, I've snapped a lot of photos with my digital camera, and I was always losing track of where I was placing them on my hard drive. Every time I took a trip or had a collection of photos, I'd download them from my camera into a separate folder on my hard drive. Soon I had poorly labeled folders of pictures all over my desktop and in various drives on my computer, it was so hard to keep track. With this software, I can dump all my photos into one folder and forget about renaming each photo file with a descriptive name because with Album, I can browse a catalog of detailed thumbnails of my photos extremely quickly and easily with no load up time. It's also sorted with a timeline by date so I can grab the timeline slider and view all pictures that were taken during a certain trip for instance. Not only that but it's got many tools that allow you quickly select a group of photos from your catalog and tag them with various descriptions like like "landscape" or "family" which then allows you quickly flip through relevant photos in the future.

Editing options are well thought out too, it provides all the easy cropping and red-eye tools etc. I need and saves both an unedited and edited version of my photos so I can go back to the original if need be.

Furthermore, the printing options are wonderful too. I can specify what size of prints I want, or even let photoshop create a bundle of sizes of a certain print or collection of prints (wallet, 8x10, 5x7) and send them to my photo printer. It even tries to save paper by intelligently cramming as many prints as possible onto a single 8x10 piece of paper. It also makes slideshows easily that can be sent to anyone else's computer, and also links to outlook express and makes it very easy to send vacation pictures etc. to others, even allowing you quickly adjust or cut down on the filesize of your pictures so they fit more easily into an email. Lastly, unlike other people's experiences, I've had absolutely no bugs with this software, which is what I would have expected from Adobe.

Overall, I've got Photoshop, and Photoshop elements, but for day to day use of my pictures including cataloging, editing, sorting, printing, and distributing my photos, I have repeatedly turned to Photoshop Album. I can't recommend it highly enough.

In the old Byte Magazine, Pournelle had a phrase he used for some products: "Infuriatingly Good." Meaning that the product (usually software) was generally excellent and enticingly useful, but had flaws that kept you pulling your hair.

That's my feeling about PhotoShop Album (PSA).

I'll need to give Adobe some slack here. I have PSA version 1.0, and I expect they will grow and improve it over time. (It takes Microsoft at least version 3.0 to get anything really good.)

I am in hearty agreement with nearly all of the positive comments about this software that I have seen in the other reviews. And there are two file handling functions that I really like that no one has mentioned:

1) It painlessly keeps the original image safe and lets you work with a copy when you need to edit it. And (unless you move the file to another directory)it keeps a hook between the original and the edited version. This is a bonus for us obsessive types that have a NEED to keep originals safe.

2) It facilitates archiving images to a permanent secondary storage like a CD. Again, this is important for safeguarding original images of valuable pictures in case the hard drive dies or you just start running short on space.

In spite of all the really excellent things about this program, there are some frustrations in the design that I hope Adobe will fix.

1) The Organizational Idea of this program is that you can put all your files in one area of the hard drive and never need to move them again. I understand where they are going with this, but I DO NOT like it. I use other programs in addition to PSA, and I want the freedom to move image files around on my hard drive. (Yes, you can move them around and then "re-connect" between the database image and the file, but this is kludgy, links between files get lost, and a lot of extra steps are involved.) Hopefully this will be fixed in VersionNext.

2) As good as the organization scheme is, it has two frustrating limits. First you are stuck with only four top level categories (or 5 if you use the special "Favorites" group) They are a good set: People, Places, Events and Other. But they are limiting. Even more limiting is that PSA only permits three levels of heirarchy. For example, you can have Places--Arizona--Grand Canyon. But you cannot have Places--Arizona--Grand Canyon--North Rim. If you have a LOT of Grand Canyon images, you want to be able to have that extra level for classification. And there are a lot of situations where I would like to have that fourth heirarchy level. Geez, when I start importing my Botanical images, I will want several levels. Yes, there are workarounds I can use to make the Four Category Three Level limitation work, But I would like the software to make it easier.

There are a few other niggling irritations, like the Advertisement it inserts into your e-mail when you use the Share Function, but I can live with them.

All told, this is a very promising program, and I will use it. And I look forward to giving the next version 5 stars.