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(More customer reviews)Corel's Photo Album 6 (formerly known as Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album) bundles together the most variety of features of any consumer-grade digital image manager -- a file-level manager, slideshow and screensaver module, creative projects (calendars, magazine covers, etc.), backup and archive module; and a basic image editor. Version 6 of Photo Album sports a new interface, some new project templates and backup options, and most importantly, easy-to-use IPTC and EXIF metadata support. The latter feature makes the program well worth the upgrade for prior users, and the best general choice for mainstream users, such as self-appointed family photo archivists, looking to organize and manage their growing collection of digital photographs for posterity.
What makes metadata support so important? A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand or remember a picture's content or context. (E.g., When and where was this picture taken? What is this a picture of? Who are these people? Why did I take this picture?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. In an analog photograph, one could write a description on back of the print itself. With digital photos, this sort of information is kept as metadata. Without metadata, that interesting digital photograph (Holiday Party 2005: Roy and Ciara with Mayor Mike. Unbeknownst to Mayor Mike, Roy and Ciara rose to power by wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.) is just another anonymous picture. It is metadata that imbues digital photographs with their context and meaning, and that enables digital photograph collections to be quickly organized or synthesized in a wide variety of ways - by timeline, event, location, person, etc.
Prior versions of Photo Album kept metadata locked away inside a proprietary database, usable only inside the program. Corel Photo Album 6's support of IPTC and EXIF metadata relegates product lock-in to the past, and potentially makes your photograph descriptions (complete memory = photograph + metadata) accessible seamlessly across:
- online-photo sharing sites that support IPTC and EXIF metadata, such as Fotki and Flickr;
- friends, family, or other users who don't use Corel Photo Album 6;
- yourself, on other computers, if or when you outgrow Photo Album 6, or the product line is discontinued.
That's potentially, because Corel doesn't quite implement IPTC support the way everyone else does. Corel Photo Album 6 is able to view metadata of digital photographs created in Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Also, Photo Album 6 does not support Unicode, so foreign language support (for recording foreign toponyms and friends in your photographs without the need for Romanize them) is limited. However, PA6 is still better than its competitors, who either do not support IPTC or EXIF metadata (leaving you locked into their products), or make it cumbersome to use.
Corel Photo Album 6 is worthy of consideration even if you've already purchased a digital photo-editor / image library manager bundle, such as Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006 or Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4. Microsoft's Digital Image Library 11 (part of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006) locks metadata inside its own proprietary database and the Windows XP NTFS file system, usable only on the single computer where the program is installed. DIS2006 users who want to share picture metadata with other users must manually copy and paste it for each picture they want to share. Further, the proprietary nature of DIS2006's database renders it susceptible to breakage - if you change the filename of an image outside the program, the image and its DIS2006 database entry are disassociated. Although Photoshop Elements 4 supports IPTC and EXIF metadata, the program continues to be disjointed - you fill in different pieces of metadata in the photo editor and photo organizer sections of the program.
Unfortunately, Corel's Photo Album 6 is just as disjointed. PA6 tracks picture title, description, and keyword information. Corel's photo editor, Paint Shop Pro 10 (equivalent to Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006's or Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4's photo editor; and a separate purchase) is needed to track picture location (city, state, country, etc.) information, among other things. However, Corel Photo Album 6's advantage over Photoshop Elements 4 is that PE4's photo organizer is very unwieldy when managing more than a few hundred photographs. It would be nice to see future versions of Corel Photo Album and Paint Shop Pro share the same metadata management features. Experienced users may look to PixVue, a free Windows Explorer extension, for a full IPTC/XMP metadata editor in the interim.
Consumers should understand that given PA6's low price, competitor programs may exceed the depth of any particular module(s) in PA6. For example, ACD System's ACDSee 8 is a better file-level manager. Simple Star's PhotoShow Deluxe 4 has the better slideshow module. With these other choices however, users may find themselves purchasing additional programs to match the breadth of Corel Photo Album 6's functionality. For example, ACDSee 8 Standard lacks a creative projects module, which ACD Systems offers for separate purchase, as FotoSlate 4.
Corel has done a very good job with Photo Album 6. It is the best general-purpose choice for both beginning and intermediate mainstream users.
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Corel Photo Album 6 DeluxeCorel Photo Album 6 offers aneasy way to organize, enhance, protect, and share your photos. Photo Album automatically downloads photos from your camera as soon as you plug it in, then rotates and organizes them for you. Then you can fix photos in a snap with one-click quick fixes. When you're done you can share photos in minutes with 1000s of creative projects including greeting cards, calendars, scrapbooks and more. Plus, you can back-up your photos on CD, protecting them in just two-clicks. Packed with everything you need, Photo Album is the complete, easy-to-use software for your digital camera.
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Capture, View, and Organize
Quick Fix and Adjust With just one click users can auto-correct the color, contrast, and brightness of their photos. The Adjust command provides simple sliders to give you complete control over a variety of settings for correcting photos. With the Add Flash tool, users can even brighten just the shadowy areas of an image.
More quick fixes and effects You can remove red-eye with one click or use the Advanced Red-Eye tool for more precision and control. The Thinify command lets you give the subjects in your photos a thinner appearance with just a few clicks. The Panorama command lets you stitch together several photos. This is particularly useful for capturing large landscapes.
Black & White and Sepia tools Corel Photo Album 6 lets you transform your color photos into black and white, and sepia tones with just one click. These quick commands are useful for giving new photos a vintage look.
E-mail and Quick E-mail The Quick E-mail and E-mail commands make it easy to send photos to friends and family. Quick E-mail automatically attaches the selected image to a new message in your e-mail program. All you have to do is add the recipient address and fill in the subject line. With E-mail, you can adjust settings to optimize the photos for quick recipient downloading.
Photo projects Corel Photo Album 6 provides creative templates to inspire you to do more with your photos. With drag-and-drop simplicity, you can create award certificates, album pages, greeting cards, calendars, CD labels, e-cards, magazine covers, and more. You can even move, rotate, and zoom in and out of photos within a template to get the exact look that you want.
New! CollagesThe new Collage project templates let you display a collection of photos in stylish and sophisticated collages. You just select a collage layout template and drag and drop photos from your folders into the collage.
Slide Shows With Corel Photo Album 6, you can easily create musical slide shows to distribute to friends and family using e-mail, or simply to display on your computer. You can also burn slide shows to Video CDs, which can be viewed on a TV using a DVD player. Now, it's quick and easy to share photos from a recent vacation, family event, or party.
Web Sharing Web Galleries let you create your own customized Web page using Corel Photo Album, or quickly upload to your favorite photo-sharing Web site.
New! Photo Finder Corel Photo Album 6 automatically finds all the photos on your computer and organizes them by the date that they were taken. This feature saves time by continuously keeping photo collection up-to-date.
New! All Photos View To provide you with the utmost flexibility in photo management, the new All Photos View lets you browse your entire photo collection at once. When the All Photos View is selected, Corel Photo Album 6 gathers every photo from every folder on your computer.
Print LayoutWith more than 40 print layout templates, Corel Photo Album 6 helps you make the most of that expensive photo paper. You can choose to print standard photo sizes, such as 8x10, 5x7, wallet-sized, and more. Print layouts also let you combine multiple photos on one page.
Five viewing options The convenient Find panel lets you choose from five viewing options, including Favorite Folders, All Folders, Calendar, Keywords, and Collections. And you can easily adjust the size of thumbnail previews. With the handy zoom slider, users can quickly zoom out to see the entire contents of a folder, or zoom in for a closer look at just one photo.
New! Favorite Photos Corel Photo Album 6 lets you designate your favorite photos with a gold star so that personal favorites can be quickly and easily identified for use in special projects, for e-mailing, or for printing.
New! Titles and Descriptions You can add titles and descriptions so that photos stand out. Corel Photo Album now saves your captions to the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) metadata so that the captions can be viewed and searched from within any program that supports IPTC.
Batch Rename With Corel Photo Album 6, you can quickly change those cryptic, numeric filenames that digital cameras assign to photos. Using the Batch Rename feature, you can easily change the name of an individual image, several selected images, or an entire folder of images.
PhotoSafe Backup SystemThe PhotoSafe Backup System helps you backup all of their photos onto CD or DVD. Archiving prevents the loss of valuable photos from hardware memory failure, or other computer mishaps, such as viruses. And PhotoSafe makes it simple by remembering which photos have already been backed-up on CD, and which photos are new.
PhotoRecovery PhotoRecovery is a straightforward application that recovers images, movies, and sound files from all types of digital media. Whether it's Memory Sticks, SmartMedia, CompactFlash, MicroDrives, Secure Digital Cards, Multimedia Chips, or floppy disks and most other forms of digital film, you simply insert your digital film into the reader, and run PhotoRecovery. Pictures are instantly saved to your computer.
What's in the box: Software on CD, Getting Started Guide, User Guide.
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