Customer Reviews

Corel Photo Album 6 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

I looked a while for software that would be good, easy to use, and that I could afford. I think I found it. So far it has done everything I asked and quickly. Easy install, quick downloading, easy cropping & enhancing, except I don't care for the "quickfix" feature in the editing part. I don't like the results of it's "fix". I have yet to "accept" the software's result after it fixes the color/exposure/contrast in the pictures. So I just fiddle with the exposure, color, etc. settings separately myself. That's pretty easy to do with this software. Other than that I think this was a good choice for me.
Sent in rebate offer. Hope it goes through. It'll be an even better deal!

I experienced some installation problems going from a trial version to a full installation but these problems were quickly resolved through the customer help line. I used the trial version of this software package that came with my computer liked it. I've used all of the major photo software titles but this one was one of the easiest and fastest to use for general enhancement of photos. I still use other software products for touch up issues. This product is a nice tool in my toolbox for processing photos.

The product is very intuitive and easy to use. Without reading a manual I am able to do all the things I want to do to organize my photos. I also spend quite a bit of time annotating photos to highlight key features for training. The one shortcoming is that there is no draw feature to drop an arrow in or create a circle to pin point items I want to draw attention to.

Otherwise it is a great product and one often suggest for those working with photos to consider.

Photo Album 6 seems fine as a program, but it automatically saves every photo as a Corel Photo Album 6 file. You cannot save as a .jpg or .bmp. This means that if you need to send a photo to someone as a .jpg, you're out of luck. A recipient who doesn't own Photo Album 6, may have problems working with the file. I have tried to get information from Corel on how to save photos as .jpg's but they charge a $25 fee for technical support. I finally uninstalled the program, but all my photos are permanently Photo Album 6 files. They are pulling a sneaky way to hold your images hostage, so that you'll always have to use Corel and pay for their upgrades. Shame.

I had tried Corel Photo Album 5 trial first and was very pleased as to the ease of use and how I was able to organize my photo's in an orderly manner. I take a lot of digital pictures and this has sure been a handy way to roganize and find my photoe's. I recommend it to anyone. Jim

Corel Photo Album 6 is very easy to use. It lets you organize photos and modify them with the click of one button. Perfect for home use to download from your digital camera, do basic edition, enhance and email your photos. You can create greeting cards, calendars, CD labels, etc using a step by step wizard and then print them at home. Recommend it for basic users of photo editing, pros should use Photoshop.

It's to bad I can't give negative stars as this package certainly deserves them. This program is total garbage. A gargantuan waste of both time and money.

Seemingly with every menu change, it recatalogues your entire photo collection, on ALL DRIVES, which takes HOURS (like 12+) to accomplish. And, while it will scan and catalogue all of the drives on your computer, don't even think about selecting a folder and expecting it to display the contents of that folder and all of it's subfolders. Ain't a gonna happen... but is will happily go through and catalogue them again for you, but, of course, after waiting hours for the software to finish catalogueing, it doesn't display the contents. No, that would be way to logical.

After realizing that my computer had slowed to a crawl, I checked the memory usage and found that the Corel Photo Album 6 Deluxe was using 6 to 7 times higher than any other program running, and that includes Norton Internet Security, a notorious memory hog! Guess we now know what the DELUXE part is!

As far as I am concerned, Corel Photo Album 6 Deluxe is neither intuitive nor is it the "Best of" anything. It is a creeping, bloated dinosaur and a total waste of your hard earned money.

The program itself is pretty good. It has some pretty good editing tools and a ton of templates for collages and photo albums. The possibilities are really endless. One could spend quite a long time at their computer being creative - or one could zip something out and print it for a quick gift if they needed to (like I did) - it's that easy to use. The only thing that I did not like was that it has a built in commercial/pop up. Everytime you enter the program - or view any photo you have, a pop-up comes up for another of Corel's products that is an extension of the Photo Album 6 that would make it work so much better if you just had this other extension for $60 more dollars. And of course they give you a small taste of what you could have only to suddenly stop you to tell you if you want more you would have to buy this other extension pack and look we've provided you with an easy link to take you there. Of course you also only have 60 days to decide. But whether you decide to take it or not, you have the reminder and the pop up every time you look at a picture. Now, I am not a computer genius and I am sure that there is an easier way to eliminate this, but I just deleted that portion of the program and - no more commercials. All in all, I really do like the product. However, I would be leary about buying another Corel product. I don't like having commercials shoved down my throat telling me that there is something way better that I could have bought.

I have been using Kodak software for years to edit my pictures. Corel makes it easy to back pictures up and move them around. The editing software is extremely easy to use giving three choices for each option. There are also a lot of creative options as well. I highly recommend this software to everyone!!!