Feature: Corel Photo Album 6 offers a number of extra graphics features
Motivation: In first half review CPA garners top marks for Organizing and Enhancing Images

Corel Photo Album 6 Deluxe edition is available for a street price of about $40US. Just on its organizing and immediate/convenient image enhancement features alone - this is a bargain tool for both digital photographers and Web graphic designers. I have used the drag and drop features of Corel Photo Album - CPA to do the layout of this Web page in Dreamweaver. But Corel Photo Album has a slew of extra features which make it useful at home as well as at work.

The screenshot above shows some of the projects users can create in Corel Photo Album Deluxe.
Al of these projects have many selectable design templates with wizard driven in easy steps to create the final graphic product, including a step for printing or delivery as required. Lets take a look at the type of projects possible with CPA:
  Print Layout - provides a number of standard multi-image layouts
  Album Page - has templates for dozens of scrapbook album pages with varying layouts
  Greeting Cards - features two types of cards with dozens of page styles and layouts
  CD Label - provides a dozen CD label layouts for Avery, Neato, and others
  eCards - features dozens of greeting card backgrounds and layouts
  Calendar - has about a dozen styles and can create multiple pages with varying layout
  Collages - provide only one basic style but about twenty layouts
  Certificates - has 8 basic certificates with single layout style
  Magazine - provides 4 basic cover styles
Each of these projects can be saved and returned to later for adding refinements or to do a variation on a theme. And wit many projects having many templates, this is certainly possible. in addition, Corel has about a dozen additional collections of templates for scrapbook, collages, and cards for $20US each.

In the screenshot below we see the Greeting Cards wizard in action with the choice of

greeting card styles in the right panel showing the various templates. Note on the top panel there is the wizard dialog describing the steps to be taken with the Back and Next buttons(truncated for this screenshot). Finally the active folder is a strip of thumbnails along the right side of the screen from which images are dragged and dropped onto the greeting card (or whatever project is being done). Let me tell you that this is a very convenient and easy to use setup and the quality of the output is very good. But there is more.

Share Features

Some of Corel Photo Albums share features have been seen before such as print and emailing; but it is worthwhile to note that CPA provides Quick or wizard guided as well as standard approaches to delivery of these services:
  eMail - it fires up your email program with the selected files preloaded
  Quick Print - gets you printing one or several shots quickly as promised
  QuickShow - my most frequently used with Collections - full screen slideshow
  VideoCD - remarkably adept at putting together a video or slideshow for CD wit burning
  Web Gallery - delivers a simple slideshow to a users website
  QuickCD - creates a slide show CD similar to website with CD burning
  Order Prints - is a shortcut to the for-a-fee Kodak or ShutterFly print services
  Screensaver - creates your own Windows screen saver
  Wallpaper - create your own wallpaper in two easy clicks


in the screenshot above I have shown my second favorite feature of CPA - the ability to change my Windows wallpaper setting with a quick couple of clicks. Note you have a simple dialog - I frequently use the Resize to fit screen option. Voila - a new background on my screen. A note of caution - the Web Gallery feature works okay on Windows servers but not on Linux/Apache servers (more than 70% of all worldwide server usage). I had to make 4 corrections to the webfile to get it to work on my website.

Summary

In general, I find the Create and Share features alone more than worth the street price of $40US for Corel Photo Album. Yes, I have seen programs that do better Slideshows or Web Galleries or CD layouts. But I like the simple layout of CPA's features because it means the product, say slideshows, is delivered quickly with no fuss. For the Web gallery I like to do my own final finishing so I prefer a simple layout - others may want more.

Finally, in the course of doing the screenshots for the review of Corel Photo Album, I have tried to feature a different view of all the many Find and Info options available to users when organizing their image files in CPA. There are many and they are powerful. The calendar example in the screenshot just above is typical, I use it all the time to find particular shoots. In short I have just touched the surface of options and capabilities here. Bottom line, if you need to organize and utilize your images in Windows, Corel Photo Album is really quite a pleasing bargain of a tool.