Home > Consumer Reviews > Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 [Old Version]

Although this product might be of use to the very casual photographer with a small number of images to manage, it still lacks two critical features missing from version 1.0 and that any one with more than a few-hundred locally stored photos will sorely miss: (1) no support for networked files without storage-hogging local caching and (2) no support for exporting catalog data. The lack of the first feature means that a local copy is made of each image you wish to index in Photoshop Album (not a good thing if you have several thousand images stored on a network!) and the lack of the second means that all of your data is trapped in Photoshop Album and is unavailable for use in other applications.

While these are flaws that might be fixed in a future version (though I'm not optimistic, given the effort that Adobe put into incidental user interface improvements in the current upgrade while ignoring these critical problems) there are two fatal flaws in the way Photoshop Album organizes images that make this product basically useless for even the casual photographer: (1) library information (tags, keywords, etc.) are not stored with the images but instead are kept in a separate database and (2) the program has no concept of folder monitoring. The first flaw is just plain bad design to my mind: because the keywords and other "metadata" applied to the images is not stored in the images themselves, if you move images around, copy them, back them up, or simply switch to another image library program in the future all of your annotations are lost. The second flaw is a huge inconvenience: it forces you to do all of your image library organization using Photoshop Album. If you decide to rearrange the folders where your images are stored, or add some images using the file system or another program, Photoshop Album will loose track of them.

There are workarounds to some of these problems (if you have Microsoft Access and can parse Photoshop Albums database, you could eventually export the album data to another program, and if you're willing to e-mail yourself copies of all of you photos, you can get versions with at least some of the metadata stored into the image files) but why bother?

A much better option for photographers of any level is Microsoft's Digital Image Library 9.0 -- it has none of the shortcomings of Photoshop Album, and even has (surprisingly!) a more functional and cleaner user interface for browsing and navigating large image libraries (the thumbnail zoom and "find similar" features are impressive).

A further note: the "comparison chart" that Adobe posts on its website comparing Photoshop Album to Microsoft Digital Image Library and Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album is inaccurate and misleading. Digital Image Library, for example, has almost all of the features listed in the "Organize and Find Your Photos" section, and does a better job of implementing almost all of them than Photoshop Album, though you'd never know it from the chart.

I haven't upgraded to V 2 but I wanted to make a few comments about Photoshop Album that I haven't seen in other reviews. Overall, I think it is a fair program with a decent interface and if you are compulsive enough to tag everything, it has a reasonable system for storing and arranging photos. However, if you are a serious photographer, it is likely that your method of arranging photos won't be Adobe's. All imports go into the Photoshop album folder with cryptic folder titles that the program selects and it's cumbersome to go back and fix the folder titles so that they mean something. If you use Photoshop and save multiple versions of a single photograph you have worked on, Album has a non-intuitive way of storing your various edits that I find frustrating to deal with. If I save each edit as a separate file, I have to go back and re-import those files into Album or try to figure out how Album has stored them.
I mainly bought PS Album for its slide show capability but it has serious deficiencies: only one music file per slide show is the first. In spite of numerous user complaints, this was not fixed with version 2. Of course, you can concatenate multiple songs into one file but that requires additional software and expense if you don't already own music-editing software.
Secondly, believe it or not, PS Album will not burn a video DVD and this feature was not added to V 2. It will burn a slide show to a DVD and you can watch the slide show on a computer but not on a DVD player connected to a TV. You can, of course, make video CDs to watch on your TV, but Album has a tremendous overhead in that it creates gigantic PDF files and a slide show larger than 50 slides may not fit on a CD. (I have a slide show of 167 images totalling 297 MB and PS Album filled up 3.6 GB on a DVD +R !!). Thirdly, it takes a really long time for even a fast computer to create a slide show of this size.
One might imagine that creating such large disks takes time, and it does. Slow performance, inadequate features, and an organization method that forces me to adapt to PS Album rather than software that works the way I want it to, will keep me from upgrading to Version 2.

I've used Photoshop Album v1 to organize thousands of digital images and found it very useful.
I was excited to get a copy of v2, but was very disappointed.

The big change in v2 is a cosmetic facelift of the application's appearance.
Unfortunately, Version 2 offers no significant new features and actually removed one of the most useful image organization views from v1!

In PS Album v1, you see an outline of Tags on the left, a 'Picture Well' in the center, and 'Properties' information on the right.

This way, as soon as you selected an image in the Well, you could look at the properties on the right of the screen and:
a) immediately see which tags had been applied to the image,
b) directly enter a caption, description, etc
c) see the EXIF metadata stored in the image by your camera
(date, time, exposure, camera settings, etc)

This mode *no longer exists* in Version 2! You can only display the image properties in a separate dialog-box that floats above (and covers) the Picture Well and/or the Tags area which is now shown on the right of the screen. The Properties window can not be 'docked' in the application frame. If you want to see the image properties, you are either unable to scroll the Tags list, or you are forced to cover up most of the images in the 'Well', or continually close and re-open the Properties window by using a menu command.

This is a step backwards from version 1, and does not address any of v1's shortcomings.
- There are still problems when using the product on a network
- You still cannot edit or add to the EXIF data in your image files (such as copyright-string, location or photographer).
- useless error messages still pop up. For example, if you drag a tag onto an image that already has that tag, (something that is much more likely in v2 since you can't easily see what tags have already been applied anymore) you are forced to 'OK' a pointless error dialog telling you that the tag has already been applied to the image.

After a week of trying v2, I have found nothing new that outweighs the loss of the v.1 organizational view. I have removed v2 from my PC and have reinstalled v1.

The loss of the very useful and efficient v.1 organization display and the lack of any other significant new feature leads me to strongly urge v1.0 users to wait until v.3 before upgrading.

I wish Adobe had spent more time improving the functionality of the application to make it more effective for users, instead of wasting their time and my money on cosmetically rounding the corners of the application windows and coloring it all grey.

Adobe's created a really great product - see other reviews for the many great features. Unfortunately, PSA also hides any directory name manipulation from the user - presumably in an effort to increase ease of use. Sadly, this means that 1) You can't combine using Photoshop Album with other photo managment programs in a meaningful way 2) You can't change the location of your photos (like, to a different disk) once they're in the catalog 3) Restoring from backup destroys your directory data 4) Saving to CD loses your directory data.

What it does it does well, but if any of the above problems bother you, consider a different program.

I've been using v1.0 for at least 6 months and I've recently purchased v2.0. I love the new interface and the collections feature however, I still don't understand why Adobe does not include a "watch folder/synching" feature. Picasa or even PictureIt! have it and this is a real time-saver!
I usually download pics from my camera into the "My Pictures" folder. Now, I'd love my photo album software to pick up the newly added images. By the same token, it should also remove the pics if deleted from that folder. This is called "synching" and due to the lack of that feature it is a real pain to manually add pictures everytime you store them into a Windows folder, not to mention worrying about importing duplicates (there is a feature warning you about duplicates but it is based on name, so if you rename the pictures then you're hosed!).