Motivation: Digital Media Albums - Organize the Digital Sprawl
Features: For 5 years graphics vendors have been getting ready to help you organize

The first thing you do after getting your new digital camera is of course take lots and lots of pictures. Why not ? One of the virtues of digital cameras is the the very low cost of taking a photo. In fact I recommend taking about 100-200 pictures a week - especially if you have a small handheld with its own rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The reasons are simple - with Lithium Ion batteries the charge per picture is reduced to nearly nothing. And as with any skill, practice makes perfect.

I regularly delete in camera about 10-30% of my pictures. At the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto recently, I was watching a young teenage gal doing her photowerks, and was she ever good. And she tossed out more than half her images - I certainly would have scooped up some of those retreads - so be careful you may have a change of heart ... and then wonder where that gem shot went to. But don't be afraid to eliminate the botches - badly under or overexposed, too blurred or just static and droll.

So now that you have hundreds of shots how do you organize and store them ? On disk on your computer is the first place... and so here is where things become a bit tricky. Assume you take 50 to 100 final images per week - that means 3500 shots times 1MB high resolution JPG = 3.5GB of disk space per year you are going to need for your images. Now most PCs come with 30-60GB drives so that appears to be more than enough space. Well, maybe ...

On the laptop I am working with, it has 20GB but 15GB is already used so an additional 3.5GB takes that to 18.5GB - well past the margin of 80% full for best disk performance. I need to archive my images onto CD, DVD or secondary hard disk. And finally, finding one or two images among a thousand can sometimes be a needle-in-a-haystack work.nter the photo catalog programs and your digital photography helping hand.

Digital Photo Catalogs:How They Help You

Most digital photo catalog software is going to help you immediately in four ways. First, they are going to help you find and organize your images. Second, they are going to display your images in simple thumbnail layout which can be made into quick slideshows. Third catalogs usually allow simple edits to individual images and assist you in then printing those images. Fourth, and most importantly, they are going to guide you through the process of making a backup copy onto CD or DVD.

If your current catalog program or the software that came with your digital camera cannot do all four of these operations - fire it right away. Instead, use one of the free picture catalog programs described below or buy one of the recommended programs. At about $50-70 these are real bargains for both amateur and professional photographers and media enthusiasts.

For the remainder of this review we will step through three levels of Digital Photo Album software.

1. The first group will be the free software. Here we will see which tools provide our four core album needs and how they measure up;
2. The next set of programs will be broader photo organizers and utilities;
3. The last group will be the album/browser software included with major graphic editing programs like Adobe Photoshop (TheBridge), Adobe Photoshop Elements(theOrganizer), Corel PaintShop pro (Photo Album standard), etc. The key question - are these bundled tools as good as the standalone album programs.

This is a fairly ambitious plan so lets get started with the freebies

Absolutely Free Photo Album Programs

There are scores of "free" photo album software programs - but after you eliminate the shareware, 30-day trials, web-based software, and obnoxious ad-ware - users are left with about a dozen or so programs. Of those we have chosen the ones that most closely meet our 4 basic album needs - 1)simple organizing images into thumbnails by folders, 2)edit and apply simple fixes to individual images, 3)display in a slideshow and/or print a collection of chosen images, and 4)burn to CD (and possibly DVD) as archival backup. Coming close to meeting these requirements certainly narrows the number of programs.

By the way we did elementary performance testing. Each program was timed for how long it took to create thumbnails for a folder containing 900 image files with average size of 720KB. We have posted those times right next to each program. Here are the Free catalog programs in alphabetical order:

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter - Win only - 80 seconds to load 900 images to thumbnails

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter is the same basic module that is used as the Organizer in the Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 program. minus these capabilities:
  1- send images to Palm Handheld
  2- A full featured quick fix graphic edit window -there is a smaller smart fix dialog;
  3- Available are create calendar, slideshow, greeting cards, photo stamps, and photo books (the latter two are extra charge services for which you will need a connection to the Web); BUT NOT detailed user-customized greeting card, CD slideshow burn, album pages, user customizable calendar pages, user customizable Web gallery;
  4- favorites and other tags BUT NOT 5 stars or user customizable;
  5- tags and collections BUT NOT stacks and versions.
As you might expect for free software, Album Starter has many of the pay for services features but inevitably lacks the refining features.

But Photoshop Album Starter certainly over-achieves on two of our four requirements. The organizing of photos adds tags, collections, and a helpful calendar view along with a big plus - instant slider control of thumbnail sizes. Also Album Starter allows users to create slideshows to full screen or PDF for convenient email or LAN delivery. But there is no burn CD or DVD capability. And the editing of individual images is a bit too auto-this-and-that. However, the price and pedigree are right.

JAlbum - Mac, Win, Linux, Solaris - 600 seconds to load 900 images to a Web gallery

This is a very attractive Web Album creation program - its is very fast and runs on all the major desktop platforms. However, we had so many problems getting it to upload file properly (it always threw in mysteriously an extra folder or three) that we have had to say go slow on this one. As soon as the code stabilizes out we will do an updated review.

Google's Picasa 2 - Win only - 30 seconds to load 900 images to thumbnails

As one can see from the screenshot this is a polished program and very fast on the scan of image in folders. It has the virtues of both Adobe Album Starter and FxFoto - good collection and organizing capabilities plus a strong suite of basic image editing features. The buttons along the bottom give an idea of all the things a user can do to organize their pictures including the convenient and very responsive thumbnail image size slider. Note also the image histogram which one can turn on or off with a button click.

But it is all the things one can do with the organized images that is impressive. The individual photo edits are not quite as impressive as FxFoto but still have good cropping, image straightening and color corrections while the range of special effects is very nifty, especially for people wanting to do B+W effects. In addition users have four ways of distributing their finished images - email, blog it, create Web pages or send to Hello.com an image sharing service. In addition it is easy to create a slideshow or print the images locally or through a online print service. Finally Picasa is the only free tool to have the ability to burn images to CD (but NOT DVD). The CD burning facilities are bare bones; but certainly a notch up on all its free competitors. Given the range of features, this is our choice for free album software. One hiccup though - it only runs in Windows.

Triscape FxFoto Standard Edition - Win only - 25 seconds to load 900 images to thumbnails

First,this program is fast - very fast loading 900 images in 25 seconds. Very nice. And as you can see from the screenshot, FxFoto offers a wide range of drawing, color correction, and image touch up features. In fact Fxfoto has the ability to do elementary masking - a key feature missing in many catalog programs photo editors. Give top marks for the ability to edit images and then produce slideshows(collages in FxFoto speak). In addition, FxFoto can deliver emails of groups of images and pretty good control of slideshows.

But it is a bit disconcerting to hit many of the organizing, CD burn, and publishing features and then discover they are not enabled and only available in the $60US Media Edition. So again our freebie software, although excellent in part still does not deliver on the 4 basic requirements - falling down on CD burn capabilities and some of the organizing features. But again, I have to admit it is pleasure to work with a blazingly fast program that has strong photo editing features. Like Adobe Starter Album,some of the advanced features will pose a learning curve and the non-working features can be nuisance popups, but Standard FxFoto is remarkably capable. Some users will decry the lack of commercial printing or photo stamp services but others like me will skip those readily.