Customer Reviews

Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 [Old Version]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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!).

Let me start off by saying that I do photography professionally and I have some 30,000 images loaded in my computer of various formats. Many are RAW files, many are PSD, some TIFF, and a lot of JPEG files. Everything from weddings to portraits, to fine art for publishing. Take this for what it's worth, but I have yet to find an image editor that is beefy enough to handle that many images. They can all be put in, but speed suffers. Most of these file managers are intended for a few hundred images at the most in my opinion.

Now, on to Photoshop Album 2. I really like many of the features of this program. I did beta testing for Adobe on this, and the final release has some quirks that I'm not totally comfortable with. One of the big issues I have with Album is the batch rename. It might as well not be there. I do all my batch renaming in the browser that's in Photoshop CS. If you use Photoshop Elements 2.0, that batch rename is even better than the one in Album, although not as beefed up as the one in Photoshop CS. In both these browsers, there are more options for renaming your files than what Album offers. And from my point of view, a file manager should be exactly that....a place where you can do ALL your managing with your files. Not image correction, file management. There's a difference. If I have to leave my file manager to do renaming or some other file management function in another program, the file manager isn't doing its job.

Another annoyance is the thumbnail cache. The more you have, the slower it gets in opening them all up. Normal I guess, but annoying none the less. If you use Windows XP, you'll find that your thumbnails open quicker in Windows explorer.

The tagging idea is a good one, but I don't see the need for the collections option. It's simply another tagging function as far as I'm concerned. Other features like the EXIF data, captions, notes, etc. are handy if you're really anal about what you're doing. Again, any notes I have on files that I've edited are in Photoshop. But for someone not using Photoshop, the fact the capabilities are in Album can be a Godsend.

One thing I will give kudos to in Album is the red-eye correction in the "fix" function. This is without a doubt the single best "one-click" red-eye correction tool I've ever tried. Also, the automatic lighting correction feature is very good as well. It seems to work similar to the levels adjustment that's in Photoshop and Elements.

The greeting card thing, calendars, etc. I don't use, but I guess they're ok if you're into that. There's just not a lot of choices as far as designs go, but what is there is reasonable. The web page designs are good and the Atmosphere Gallery is a nice tool provided you have your own web site to put them on. The timeline can be handy if your sort your files by date. I don't, so it doesn't mean much to me.

Other than the above, I didn't find the program to be buggy, no crashes or anything like that. Overall, this is a decent program for the average shooter to manage their files with. It's really no better or worse than ACDSEE, Ulead Photo Explorer, or any of the others out there. The UI is clean and easy to work with. Once you learn to navigate your way around, it gets easier. At first, it can be a little disconcerting and frustrating, but you need to be patient. Sorta like you would need to be patient with Photoshop or Elements. We are dealing with Adobe here, remember?

So bottom line here is if you're considering Album as your file manager, go for it. Especially if you use Photoshop Elements since the two do work together. That would explain why Adobe saw the advantages of bundling them together in one package. Not to mention that it was a great marketing ploy. Anyway, if you take your time with it and learn the nouances, I think you'll be happy.

I planned to save my RAW files created by my Canon Digital Rebel and was surprised to learn that, while Photoshop Album 2.0 can handle a number of different RAW formats, those created by that (popular) digital camera are not recognized (I confirmed this with Adobe). So, beware; check the Adobe web site for info about your camera before buying this package.
If you do purchase Photoshop Album 2.0, be sure to go to the Adobe Web site and look for recent downloads in order to get the latest version -- 2.0.1 Apparently this corrects a number of 'issues' that have plagued this program.

I recently got his program with a new digital camera. After a few hours of use I must conclude, that any shareware is likely to be better. Adobe Photoshop Album has serious deficiencies.

The program collects all images in a single window. There you have the possibility to assign tags. This will allow you to sort images according to the tags associated. Unfortunatley nobody knows where the tags are stored or where Adobe has decided to store the thumbnails associated with them. They are surely not associated to the image folder and the file where they are stored is encrypted. If you ever should decide to use a new program or to rearange the images you will find yourself in a big problem. Most likely you will loose all of your hiearchy and many hours of work. This is particularly troublesome, since Adobe Album does at no time create folders that somehow go along with the tags but rather leaves you with huge folders full of unsorted images.

Also, if you ever should whish to share photos, you can create a slideshow. Rather than creating a file with referencs to the images already stored on your computer, a new Acrobat file is created. That would be fine - yet after 30 images your computer is about to crash, since the file generated from the meagapixel cameras that we nowadays have is just too big. It is unlikely that you can share your images at all...

I would not recomend anybody to use this program. It might do a good job as long as you only frequently take pictures and as long as you do neither seriously share your images nor move images from one hard disk to another.

The organizational and creations features are much improved, I especially love the new Calendar interface, which is like having a photojournal for any day you take pictures. Also the new creations process is much more fun and easy to use. I can make a great slideshow, album or photobook presentation in PDF form in a few minutes. The VCD quality is much improved since v1 also. My only real complaint is the uncomfortable location of the new properties pane. It's not dockable, it just floats by itself over everything... kinda wierd...
No, PSA is not perfect...yet...but it's getting there!!!

Album 2.0 is a great product for the quick and easy scanning & downloading of photos, editing and correcting, and organizing them into family and work catagories. I organize the photos with 'tags' (labels) identified by person, place and family/work event or other catagories. That way, I can pull up all photos in the catagory of "Aunt Bessie", my "1999 Barcelona Vacation", "Old Swedish Relatives", "Son's 2003 Birthday Party", or "San Andreas Fault-Imperial Valley" and create slide shows for friends, relatives and collegues. I haven't yet tapped into 20% of the resources available with the program. For those difficult to edit photos using Album 2.0, one can use Elements or Photoshop.