Customer Reviews

Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Edit: I was pleased with it while I used it. But since posting the review below, I've stopped using it in favor of the (now free) program Picasa, available through Google.

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I tried a bunch of other programs and free trials, and this one packed the most stable and useful features into the cleanest, most intuitive, and most convenient package.

I especially like the design of the cropping tool, the ease of assigning and customizing the categories while organizing, and the clean simplicity of the interface. I'm perfectly capable of using complicated programs, and figuring out how to use programs that aren't very user-friendly. But when you're trying to organize a ton of digital photos, why make it more work than you have to?

Paint Shop Photo Album 4 does what it does very well, and does all of the things I would ask a photo album program to do.

It makes it easy to print, share, and organize my photos. For quick photo touchups, resizing, rotating, adding captions, and the other kinds of edits that an average home user would want to make to their photos, the editor included in this program is quite suitable, and does a very nice job.

It also has a nicer format for creating web pages to share photos online than most of the other similar programs I tried.

I've been using the 30 day free trial, (which is a full version rather than a chopped down sample) and my time is almost up, so I am definitely going to by this program.

PS Photo Album 4 is a quick and easy way to take control of your digital pictures. Lots of great features, my favorites:

1) Selecting a bunch of pictures and telling the software to email them. It automatically resizes them down to a (configurable) small, manageable size and places them in an email as attachments. A necessity when you have multi-megalpixel image files.

2) Fast and easy red eye correction.

3) Very neat, interactive photo-touchup wizard for quick photo-enhancements.

4) If I need finer control over the images, it is fairly well integrated with Paint Shop Pro (if you happen to own it as well).

5) Being able to label pictures and then search through all your pictures by keywords.

6) The ability to archive photo albums onto CD-R and still have the software keep track of them.

Overall a very effective and convenient program. You can get a 30 day trial from the Jasc website before making the plunge.

I use Jasc Paint Shop Album 4 to store my photos in albums, print photographs and create HTML files to display photos on my hosted space.

I like its red eye repair and crop tool. If quick fix will fix a photo that has minor problems thats great. But most photos are enhanced in adobe photoshop elements 2 ( the brush selection tool is fantastic). Together they do a great job.

The print capabilities are very flexible.
Pick a number of pictures to a page
or a given size picture on a page
or a combination print (various)
or lots of special sizes and paper I don't actually use

After the picture(s) is formatted you can select any one and zoom it in or out, grab it and move it around in the space(great feature).

40 +/- html formats for creating web galleries for your pictures. Many you can change background color, font, etc.
Elements and several other programs I have also create Web Galeries quite easily but I seem to come back to the ones in this program most of the time.

Great tool.

After trying 4 different photo processing software products (including the Adobe Photoshop Album and Elements 2.0)for about 3 weeks I decided to buy the Paint Shop Album 4.0.
I give this product 4.5 stars! It offers the best blend of useful photo processing features,user friendliness/interface clarity, easy navigation, low price. The only thing that I would've liked to see (perhaps this is going to be done in future releases)is for the Album 4.0 to include few more of the key features (such as Clarify, etc.) of its powerful Paint Shop Pro 8.0 cousin.

I downloaded the 30-day free trial version of this before purchasing it. ...It has all the basic functionality you need to resize, crop and adjust your photos. For the price it's perfect. If you want to do more things with your photos then check out Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, but this and your digital camera is pretty much all you need for great photos for print and online distribution.

Photo Album 4 seems to be a good value. It lets me see my individual images and how they relate to the rest of my collection. I can finally see the forest and the trees of my image collection. Moving images around is a snap. Organizing them with keywords is really cool. And the Titles and Descriptions that move around with the pictures make website building all the easier. Digital image software focusing on editing images as its primary thing just doesn't have the retrieval and organizational features Photo Album has.

Although it can be argued Photo Album is short on editing features, I didn't buy it as an editor. I bought it to organize my digital images and quickly create websites from this organized repositiory.

Photo Album seems to be about letting you, your family, and friends more easily enjoy your digital image collection. I really have had more fun with my images since I downloaded and installed it; especially old images I have rediscovered on my harddrive.

I will buy this at the end of my evaluation.

======= PLUSSES ========

+ The tool is simple to set up and use.
+ Some of the tools can be used in BATCH mode against a group of images.
+ The "create slide show" is simple and straightforward. In just a few questions your slide show can be created and saved.
+ The create Video CD options is great! You can burn a CD-ROM which will play in most DVD players as a slide show [but with caveats, see below]
+ An adjustment wizard leads the novice through various image manipulations. It is not QUITE as handy as it ought to be.
+ Create "Web Gallery" has a variety of formats for creating a web site. Some simple customization can be done, and the site can be uploaded using the "publish to web" feature. To see an actual web gallery created this way...[go online...]MINUSES =======

- Preserving ordering of an album! I had difficult time keeping my slide show in MY desired order rather than alphabetic by file name.
- The contrast/brightness/flash adjustments do not work as well for under or over-exposed images.
- A set of about 8 different separate adjustments can be done to an image but all such adjustments are in the form of ONE tool. These adjustments can't be applied in batch mode.
- The organization of the image tools is rather odd.
- Creating a Video CD has some difficulties.
> On one machine I got "error writing to DVD" and needed to reboot.
> Some undesireable behavior results when you create Video CDs
with certain options (like background music).
> Video CDs don't display/preserve the Title and Descriptions
visible on web or slide shows **AND** the slide show added to the Video CD doesn't include title or descriptions either! [BAD!]

- The Jasc support site is sparse on information, and they have been unresponsive about issues I've raised - took one week to answer 2 of my 4 questions, the others were not addressed.

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For an exhaustive review, see my write up [online...]

This program worked fine on my computer (Win 2k pro) for about a month, and then i can't open it, i get a "An unamed file contains an invalid path" error message. Have done everything short of re-formatting my hard drive, which I probably won't do, easier to buy a competitor's product that will work...I've asked Jasc for support 2 months ago, and nothing has happened, and nothing posted on their web site as of 11/13/2003. Some of the batch functions that I purchased this product for got added to PSP 8. Now I see they are trying to sell PSP 8 and Photo album as a "suite." Go to www.jasc.com and read through the forums for this product (or any product, for that matter) before purchasing.

I ordered this item, then downloaded the "Full Featured" evaluation from JASC so I would be able to use it while waiting ...

While the editing of pictures was very easy and intuitive, I had several issues with some of the higher end features.

1) It would not recognize my printer as being able to print an 8x10 format, as a result, I was limited to 2 4x6 pictures per page, while Microsoft allowed me to fit 3 4x6 pictures on a page (one in landscape, the other two in portrait)

2) The Panoramic feature just jumbled the series of photos in a confusing array. JASC support said it was probably the quality of the shots, but the Photostich software that came with the camera had no problems stitching the shots together into a nice panorama.

3) I made several attempts to make the Photo CD which alleges to create a CD that displays on my DVD player as well as having the ability to run a slideshow when the CD is placed in a computer that does not have the jasc software. The first test with 2 small slideshows worked OK, When I increased the number of slide shows and included the text screens, the software went through all the motions, and claimed success, yet the CDs were unreadable by either the PC or the DVD player. (Total size of the contents was 380M, well under the capacity of the CD, so size was not the issue...

Product support for this software is non-existent. Purchased Photo Album 4 specifically to record slide shows with audio onto CD's. It has never worked. I have e-mailed JASC technical support numerous times over the last several weeks without a reply. Very frustrating.