Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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144 of 154 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Basic, but most well-rounded., August 9, 2004
Jasc's Photo Paint Shop Album (PPSA) Version 5.0.1 is a nice upgrade to version 4 that puts the program on equal or slightly better footing with ACDSystem's ACDSee version 6 and Adobe's PhotoShop Album (PSA) version 2. Version 5 introduces a prettier interface; adds a calendar-based organizational view, a bunch of creative project and print templates - for coffee books, CD/DVD labels, calendars, etc.; and some basic archival features. PPSA's strength is that it bundles together the most variety of features of any consumer-grade digital media library manager, and that makes Paint Shop Photo Album the most well-rounded choice for mainstream beginner and intermediate users new to digital image management.
With the addition of creative project templates, Photo Paint Shop Album 5 becomes a better choice than Adobe PhotoShop Album 2. The latter's crippling weakness is that it is unable to automatically detect and synchronize new or deleted photographs to and from its internal catalog database. Unlike ACDSee 6 and PhotoShow Deluxe 3, PPSA's creative projects are things users may print themselves. ACDSee and PhotoShow Deluxe simply supply links to websites (Snapfish, etc.) where users order and pay for their own creations.
Consumers should understand that given Photo Paint Shop Album's low price, competitor programs may exceed the depth of any particular module(s) in PPSA. For example, ACDSee has the better file-level manager. Simple Star's PhotoShow Deluxe 3 has the better slideshow module. With these other choices however, users may find themselves purchasing additional programs to match the breadth of Photo Paint Shop Album's functionality.
If there is a weakness to Photo Paint Shop Album, it is metadata. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand 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?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. Metadata is the useful mnemonic device that stores this information.
Photo Paint Shop Album locks picture metadata (image title, description, and keyword category) inside a proprietary database instead of supporting the EXIF and IPTC metadata standards (which embed metadata inside the picture file). PPSA users therefore cannot easily share a complete memory with those who do not use Photo Paint Shop Album. Without accompanying metadata, an office party photograph (Office Holiday Party 2004: Roy and his wife Maya, Ciara and Laura. Unbeknownst to Maya, Ciara is Roy's workplace mistress.) quickly becomes just another picture. As digital photograph collections become mainstream, support for EXIF and IPTC metadata should become only more important, to provide a standard, seamless way to share, search for and organize images based on timestamp and picture caption content - among a user's chosen image manager, online photo-sharing service (such as Fotki.com), and family and friends (who may use something other than Photo Paint Shop Album). PPSA users who want to share picture metadata with other users must manually copy and paste it for each picture they want to share.
In Version 5, Paint Shop Photo Album's continued lack of EXIF and IPTC metadata support becomes a functional liability. Version 5's new Calendar View utilizes EXIF timestamp information to create its timeline-based organizational view of pictures, but ironically, the program lacks an EXIF editor. Users who want to scan and organize their shoeboxes of old photographs and film negatives, and those who order picture CD's along with their analog film developing orders cannot take full advantage of PPSA's Calendar View. PPSA sorts pictures lacking EXIF timestamps by the file system's Last Modified Date, because the program cannot timestamp the original date the photograph was taken. Fortunately, users can turn to freeware EXIF metadata editors to mitigate this issue, such as Exifer (http://www.exifer.friedemann.info).
Despite PPSA's letdown on EXIF and IPTC metadata support, most consumer-grade digital media library managers also still do poorly in metadata management, which sort of defeats the purpose of their existence. Of Paint Shop Photo Album's competitors, only ACDSee has EXIF metadata editing abilities, and therefore, a fully-functional Calendar View.
Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 5 is a well-rounded introduction to digital image library management. Curious users may quickly outgrow PPSA's rudimentary implementations of many features and look for more advanced software, but Paint Shop Photo Album 5 introduces people to more exciting possibilities of digital photography and digital image library management than its competitors.
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33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Easy to use, easy to organize, easy to back up, September 13, 2004
I was looking for a piece of software to help me manage my growing cache of digital photos. I looked at uLead, iMatch, IDImager, Adobe, and more. I chose Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe. It is well designed, easy to use and does all I need.
- Organize by keyword, date, file folder
- Archive to CDs and access them (the software "remembers" where they are)
- Quickly do the most common photo enhancements (red eye, contrast, etc.)
- Fast loading of images
- Easy to pull the pictures off of my camera's CF card
They have a free trial at www.jasc.com, and I highly recommend it.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good enough for 90% of my images, then there's Photoshop, December 30, 2004
I first started using a digital camera in 1999. It was a $700 1 megapixel Epson, it was such a big deal then that Epson coined it 'The Megapixel' camera. The sofware included was 'Image Expert' by Sierra Imaging. ImageExpert was compact and very easy to use. It allowed me to accomplish 90% of my photography tasks. I've used the software it for the next 4 digital cameras and 2 computers. Never felt the need to upgrade or replace the software. Although once in a while I would use Photoshop to really work an image.
I liked Image Expert very much and was trying to find the latest version of it. I couldn't find it initially since a few years is an eternity in the digital world. With a little help from Google, I was able to trace it to 'JASC PAINTSHOP PHOTO ALBUM 5'. Jasc Software, the makers of Paintshop Pro bought the rights of Image Expert from Sierra Imaging and called it 'Jasc Aftershot' eventually it was changed to it's current name. In October 2004, Jasc Software was bought out by Corel, makers of WordPerfect, CorelDraw etc. I was pleased that this software is part of Corel as it would certainly guarantee support, quality and longevity.
I have 4 days left in the trial version I'm ready buy it and to share my experiences:
The first thing you'll notice is a very clean and simple interface with pleasant colors and large buttons. The top of the screen is your traditional Windows Pulldown menu's, (file, edit, view ...tools, help ...etc) so there's inmediate familiarity. Right below you'll find four large tabs: Organize, Enhance, Create and share. Clicking each Tab will reveal a separate set of related tools buttons. The program is very intuitive and these tabs pretty much summarizes the software.
Tool highlights (This is the sequence that I use) :
1. Cropping: click on the crop button, a cropping box appears on the image, click and drag the edges of the box, click the ok button and that's it.
2. Quick Fix: a one button tool that will eliminate the 'haze' found in many digital photos, It's similar to the 'autolevels' tool in Photoshop. I suspect that there's some sharpening and contrast enhancement also. Unless you have extreme lighting and colorcast situations the 'QuickFix' button is all you need!
3. Red Eye: Never used a redeye tool it until now. Simply click on the redeye tool, pan and zoom, place the circle on eye, click and voila! Like magic.
4. Keywords: open image, select key work on left panel (birthday, vacation ...etc) or type your own. Once you save the image the keywords are imbeded. You can then retrieve the image by keywords, no need to mess around with filenaming.
3. Print Templates: This is my favorite feature. Navigate to templates, choose your template and the software will populate it with images of your current folder. My favorite template is an 8.5x11 sheet containing two 4x6's and several wallet and mini wallet sizes.
Well that's it! I recommend this software without hesitation!
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