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

I started with PhotoShop Album 1.0. Because of it and the ease of managing and enjoying my photos, I really got back into digital photography. I had tried many other products and this is the best I've seen. When I upgraded to 2.0, I really appreciate many of the new features. The VCD creation is much improved. The new collection feature is extremely useful. The new editing tools (while pretty different from 1.0) are actually pretty amazing what they can do to a photo, particularly one that's too dark or lacks contrast. I also own PhotoShop Elements 2.0 and the integration between the two is very useful. My only gripe is that 2.0 seems to be a bit slower than 1.0 in moving around in the photo catalog. I think my 4 yr old computer (800MHz) is now starting to show it's age and I didn't notice it so much with 1.0, but that tends to happen with almost any software package these days. Highly recommended to anyone, particularly teamed with PhotoShop Elements 2.0 for fancier photo editing.

I like Photoshop Album. The user interface is quite intuitive, it's reasonably fast and it has all the features I need for working with thousands of digital photos.

However, it wouldn't have hurt if Adobe had spent a few more QA cycles on it. I have updated to 2.0.1, but it's still pretty shaky.
Try to type european special characters via Alt+0xxx in the caption line - BOOM.
Try to import photos from a folder that also contains Quicktime videos (which my digital camera generates) - BOOM, and no workaround. There are now whole areas of my photo collection that I cannot view because I have accidentally imported Quicktime videos...
I don't use the "Creations" and "Online Services" parts of the program at all, so I can't say anything about them.

I'd give four stars if the quality was reasonable. Let's hope the next version is better.

Most likely one of the most frustrating applications ever to pollute my hard drive! I'm an avid user of Photoshop, I think it's a wonderful application, so how can the folks at Adobe create Photoshop Album, and screw it up so bad?!? The program crashes, ruins pictures, makes slide shows of your pictures all cropped wrong, with no option to change it.

Run!

I've really tried all the album software out there - and this is just the nicest. Now, I'm one of those people that believes that you should stick with Microsoft unless someone else does it much better - as good ole MS usually wins the war in the long run. That said, this is better than MS product - which I got bundled with Digital Image Studio 9. It does everything I wanted and more. It fixed several of the problems (missing functionality) from v1 (note, the ridiculous inability to make top level tags is fixed and now allowed - as well as the problem handling network drives - though that was fixed in v1 with a patch). Anyway, it cleanly and easily outputs your photos to any format you could want. It outputs your photos to any device you could seemingly want. It imports and organizes your photos any way you could want - enough said.

Oh, and to the reviewer who wants a "sync" feature. Why? The whole point of having album software is to place the photos in the photos album and let it store it in its database. Why would you want to keep your own copy in the Windows "My Pictures" directory? The whole idea here is to replace the functionality of "My Pictures" with something more robust. And, for that matter why would you rename existing (imported files)?

A good product bundled with Photoshop elements. The program is mostly intuitive, presenting your photos in a way that make sense. The tagging feature, to sort photos, works nicely. The program does freeze up a bit, especially when moving back and forth between the Album and the Editor. All in all, for amateur photographers (and software users) such as myself, this is a good product. If you learn it you will eventually work around the small problems.