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

While Photoshop Album has many exciting features, it is not a professional product comparable to other Photoshop products. The major flaw is that it constantly freezes up, sometimes with error messages, sometimes without. I have gone to the Adobe website for support, but am so overwhelmed by the number and complexity of suggested cures that I do not wish to begin. Ultimately, I had to remove it from my hard drive.

Anothr flaw, thumbnail filenames are not visible in either the catalogue or work space. I have nearly 10,000 files currently organized by the sequential numbering system that my Nikon Coolpix provides, including a detailed technical description of each photo. But instead of file numbers in Photoshop Album thumbnails, I get exclusively the date and time. While dates and user supplied tags, which Photshop Album provides, are acceptable methods of organization, filenames, which the program does not provide, are invaluable when working on specific projects, especially large ones like weddings, birthdays, holidays, family gatherings and such, which may contain several hundred files. When I open a folder of 300 digital wedding photos,for example, all taken on the same day, the date and time visible on Photoshop Album thumbnails are of no value-I need my original filenames, especially if I wish to retrieve, edit and save the original photos in different formats often with different photoshop effects. Without filenames, the program seems designed primarily for amateurs.
Another problem, when I move files around in the workplace, the program always snaps back to the beginning. If I switch, for example, file 124 with 126, the program executes the change then automatically snaps all the way back to the beginning row of files, forcing me to scroll after each switch back to the area I'm working in. This yo yo effect is very inefficient and thorougly annoying.

I have contacted Adobe, but no response. My advice, if you are a pro looking for a great way to organize thousands of files, wait for Photoshop Album 2.0. Maybe somebody out there in Seattle is really listening to customer complaints and will make the appropriate changes.

Adobe Photoshop Album is, in a word, fabulous. First it helps you in finding all your photos. A Photoshop Album catalog can, according to the included Readme document, contain up to 50,000 images (if you need to catalog more pictures, my hat is off to you -- but don't worry as you can create multiple catalogs). You can tell it to simply scan an entire drive for images, or you can use the enhanced routines to collect photos from your hard disk, digital camera, scanner, or CD.

Once Adobe Photoshop Album knows where your pictures are, you can begin cataloging them. Adobe's software engineers have made a forward leap in "ease of use" by converting a sophisticated keyword database into a simple drag and drop tagging system. The tags are simple (and dare I say fun?) to make. Once built, they can be effortlessly drag-and-dropped into one or many photos. Images can have as many tags as you need. Since the tags use tiny photo-image icons (that you can select and edit -- hence the 'fun') you can see at a glance which one you're looking for. The tagging system is cool to use and very functional.

After an image is tagged and dated, finding pictures becomes a dream come true. Want to seek out pictures of a person? Just click the box by their tag. Want to find all the pictures of your kids at grandma's house? Assuming you've created and added the right tags, just click-click. Want to find all the pictures taken during the week of a vacation? Just use the on-screen timeline, or even a very-familiar looking calendar interface. (The fact that the calendar interface looks like a nice wall calendar is indicative of how much work Adobe's team put into the user interface).

Although it shines at digital image cataloging, the software fell a bit short when it was time to catalog my collection of scanned images. There are no tags or shortcuts for dating photos. Since I wanted to change the picture's catalog date from the file date (i.e, when I scanned it) to the actual date (when it was taken), I had to go through a fairly cumbersome series of mouse clicks. Some of the super-usability shown in the tagging system could have gone into dating photos.

Adobe Photoshop Album includes a decent set of editing tools. You can select a variety of "one click fixes" to sharpen the image or adjust levels. There are other tools for more controlled adjustments, such as brightness and contrast sliders, and hue and saturation sliders. I will say these basic tools are very well implemented, and you can make a basic fix -- say, crop, brighten and sharpen -- extremely quickly. If you need more fine control, Adobe Photoshop Album works well with Adobe Photoshop Elements (and, I am sure, Photoshop itself). I presume it can be set to work with other photo editors.

Beyond cataloging, Photoshop Album offers a set of tools to share the images through email, slideshows, photo albums. The email option works only with Hotmail and Outlook Express, which is unfortunate for Netscape, Mozilla and Eudora users. It can even burn video CDs. As well as printing your photos, it will help you create and print greeting cards and calendars as well. Finally you can share photos using something called Adobe Atmosphere Gallery. The last is an impressive, if rather bizarre, tool to put your images up on the virtual walls of a virtual 3-D gallery.

Adobe Photoshop album offers an easy link to printing your photos through an online service. However, although right now the only service the program offers me is Shutterfly. Since I use Ofoto, I'll go ahead and keep uploading photos the old-fashioned way.

Adobe Photoshop album will back up your photos onto CD-R, CD-RW or DVD, which is probably good for people who don't otherwise back up their photo collection. In fact, given it's ability to work with digital cameras and scanners, email and the Web, your printer and online printing services, and CDs and DVD's, Adobe Photoshop Album could honestly be the only photo software you need. Users who want greater editing resources will need a more powerful imaging program, but this software can certainly do everything else.

If possible, I probably would have given Adobe Photoshop Album four and a half stars. With a large collection of scanned family photos, dating them for inclusion in the catalog is an unnecessarily tedious chore. However, the software is exceptional in all other respects and I was happy to round up instead of down. A fine, fine program.

The more I use this product the more I like it. I think the beauty is in its simplicity. If you are planning on using this program alone for picture management, it will do very well. It has some concepts that I think are very good:

1) Image tagging for easy retrieval
2) Archival so you can put pictures on CDs and later access them
3) Backup facility
4) Simple photo touching capabilities to fix many problems (red eye, dark pictures, etc).
5) Your editing of pictures never affects the original (important to me)
6) You can plug in other editors (i.e Elements, Paint Shop Pro)
7) Nice interface to get the pictures from the camera/hard drive/Flash card directly
8) Slide show creator
9) Automatic email with picture resizing (tweakable)
10)Information display about the picture characteristics (when taken, aperture, speed, flash, etc.)
11) Very nice time line and search capabilities
12) Multiple catalogs (can work on only one at a time)
13) Single interface to all your pictures regardless of what directory they are in (or CD)
14) Export capabilities to take the pictures of an album and put them together in one place

Make sure you download the 1.0.1 update since 1.0 was buggy. It also has some annoyances:
1) Tagging system is a bit rigid
2) Hard to work in a network environment
3) If you start moving the files outside of Album things get ugly fast. You pretty much have to make a commitment to it.

I suggest you download the trial from the Adobe site. It gives you the capabilities for 250 pictures and 1 catalog. Whatever work you do under the trial will transfer to the retail version. If you want simple and dont want to mess with directories, this program might do the trick for you.

As a photographer & Photoshop 7 user, I chose this program to be assured of it's "full" support for Photoshop .psd image files, which it has.

I fully expected that the program would provide me the ability to create "my own" "Categories", then, create "Sub-Categories within them.

Adobe apparently felt that the typical user's of the program would lack the creative intelligence to create Main Category-titles of there own, so they, "In Microsoft-mentality", decided to provide their choices, which can't be changed or renamed.

There's a work-around, in which you can select Adobe's "Other" category, and then make Sub-Categories within Sub-Categories; but need for a "work-around" is less than I'd expected from Adobe.

I'd suggest checking out Picaso...or Kodak Easy Share -Free dowload, before settling on this one!

This program is a GREAT photo organizer. It makes it easy to classify photos as many ways as you want (multiple tags are just fine), and it is a piece of cake to find the photos later. If that is all you use it for, you are in good shape.

However, it is obvious that this program was meant to be used with another photo retoucher. For instance, I tried to use the red-eye reducer. It was unresponsive (and I have a pretty high-end machine), and it completely destroyed the skin tones on my photos.

My suggestion is to bring the photos in from the camera to a photo editor (I recommend, and use, Microsoft Picture It! Digital Image Pro), and then when you are done there, suck the photos into Adobe for organizing.

If Album were integrated into Photoshop Elements, Adobe would have a killer product.