Adobe Photoshop Album

When you don't have to buy film or fuss around getting it developed, you start taking a lot more photos. After a few months with a digital camera you'll end up with so many images you start to have problems enjoying them, and even the largest hard drive gets full in the end. Photoshop Album makes it blissfully simple to keep track of all your photos without worrying about the complex folder structure they might be filed in; it searches your hard drive for photos and files them by the date you snapped them, with a handy timeline along the top of the screen so you can easily jump to the photos you took last Christmas. You can even get a day-by-day view with the calendar which lays out the pictures you took on each day of the month.

Album isn't a powerful image editor like Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements, but the single-click tools help you remove red-eye, adjust brightness and contrast, modify lighting, crop out trouble spots, and fix colour saturation without needing to be an expert, plus there are auto-fixing tools for absolute beginners. The results are good, but you can choose an image editing program to open images in for editing instead. And you don't have to worry about making mistakes because Album always works on a copy of the file.

Organising your photos into categories is as easy as dragging and dropping icons from the tag window at the side onto the pictures. Then you can search your photos by ticking the tags you're interested in; if that doesn't narrow it down enough, you can select just a part of the timeline. This is a simple and intuitive way to work, and you can flip quickly between the photos that match and the ones that don't, or run a more complex search using dates, filenames, captions and whether you've e-mailed, printed or used them in various ways.

You can even find photos with a similar range of colours in, if you're looking for images that work well together. That comes in handy when you want to do something with your photos, which is another area where Photoshop Album shines. If you can think of a way to share your photos, Photoshop Album does it: the Creations Wizard walks you through creating video CDs, calendars, cards, e-cards, e-mail, Web pages and 3-D galleries, many of them based on PDF and all with handy features like automatically resizing photos so they're small enough to e-mail. If you just want to print there's an excellent selection of layouts to fit more snaps onto pricey photo paper. And if you want to burn photos to CD to make space on your hard drive, the thumbnails stay in the catalogue so you can browse or search for them and find out which CD they're on.

There are one or two minor niggles with Photoshop Album, in particular the way you can't change the (American) date format it uses; plus there's no way to apply the same corrections to several images. Despite that, the interface is exceptionally easy to work with and the tools for working with your images are excellent. There are plenty of other products that aim to organise your photos and most image editors have rudimentary tools but Photoshop Album beats most of them hands down. --Mary Branscombe

The tagging system is at the heart of this software. Photoshop Album comes with six main (unchangeable) categories - People, Places, Events, Other, Hidden and Favourites. You can add sub-categories to these main categories. For instance the People category could consist of your own sub-categories of Family, Friends and Work Colleagues. Within these sub-categories, tags are created. For example, within the Family subcategory I would add the tags Robert, Susan, Sarah, Andrew and Jack. These tags would then be attached to appropriate photographs within my collection, thus making it extremely easy to quickly find and view all photos of Jack and Andrew for instance.

To make the software work for you, it is vital to take a bit of time beforehand to plan the subcategory and tagging elements that will work for your collection. Otherwise (yes, like me) you'll end up removing tags from photographs and starting over again several times before getting it right. My advice is to keep subcategories general and tags specific - this makes it a lot easier to add to your requirements in future.

To edit a photograph, once it has been tracked down, it takes two clicks to then open it within your favourite editing program. Photoshop Album ensures that a copy, not the original, is used in this process. This is a much better option than using the standard browse facilities as available in Photoshop, Elements or Paint Shop Pro.

Other useful facilities included in Photoshop Album include some useful basic editing requirements such as cropping and red eye removal and a number of creative options for making cards, calendars, slideshows, video CD's etc.

There are some downsides to Photoshop Album of course - not even Adobe gets it all right first time! Only one level of subcategory can be created, so no sub-subcategories are possible. This would allow more powerful searching of the media, but I guess would add to the complexity of the software too. At the moment it is very easy to use. It would also be useful to have more complex tag search options available. A NOT option would be very useful, for example if I want to find photographs which include Robert and Susan but that were not taken in Mallorca.

These problems do not however take away from the fact that this is a lovely, easy to use piece of software that will only improve with age. Already I wouldn't be without it.


Absolutely essential for digital camera users   March 10, 2003
C. Bootle (London UK)
33 out of 35 found this review helpful

If you're a regular user of a digital camera you will probably find you have a hard-disk crammed with photos with no means of searching or browsing. Having read rave pre-release reviews in the computer press I pre-ordered this software and was not disappointed. Everything about it shines. It's logical to use - within minutes I had installed it, scanned my hard-disk (it found 1700 photos), selected a few and built a simple but effective album ready for uploading to my website.

The main screen shows ALL the photos that have been found by the software. These can be displayed as tiny or small thumb-print, four to the screen or one image at a time. When viewing individual images, you are able to type in a description of the photo, which can then be used during searching and appears in 'albums' such as websites, PDA, slide-shows and so on.

The software also includes basic photo retouching software (e.g. red-eye removal) which works well enough, but for more advanced retouching you can tell it to use Adobe or third-party software (such as Photoshop Elements).

I was hesitant in buying a version 1.0 release - but so far have found no faults!


Very useful especially if you have lots of digital images   March 8, 2003
28 out of 28 found this review helpful

Photoshop Album is Adobe's offering to manage and organize digital images on your PC. The price is on the high side for the features available but you are buying a product from the top brand in the field of imaging.

With a digital camera and/or scanner you will quickly accumulate a large number of digital images and it can get very difficult to manage your collection. Photoshop Album provides a tool to organize and catalogue your images simply so that you can retrieve them without having to create and then navigate complex file and directory structures on your hard disk.

There are other products on the market and you may well already have bundled a similar product with your scanner / camera. Where Photoshop Album stands out from the crowd is the use of tags. These are like adding post-it notes to your images which you can then search on. E.g. you can add a tag to all photos featuring the family cat making it a simple exercise to find all your images of your favourite pet. You can add multiple tags to an image making Photoshop Album much more flexible than organizing images in directories on disk. There is also a calendar that date/time stamps your images with information from your digital camera or when the image was filed. An annoyance of this feature is that it always uses the American date format rather than using the local date/time settings set in Windows. Photoshop Album has a tool to make backups of the image catalogue and it worth doing this regularly in case a disaster strikes your hard disk.

Nice features of Album are the various facilities to share your images. There are templates for creating slide shows, eCards, calendars, greetings cards etc based on PDF technology. These can be emailed, printed, or burned to CDs. eCards are a nice way to email your friends a copy of your favourite images along with background music. An Adobe viewer is required to view these and viewers are free and available for a wide range of operating systems.

There are limited features for fixing images such as removing red-eye. Photoshop Album links with Photoshop Elements for serious image editing. Photoshop Album is a standalone program and does not require Photoshop Elements but if you have Elements then Album integrates nicely with it.

Photoshop Album would have received five stars if were better priced and did not have a few annoyances such as use of the American date format, scanned images can be reported as too large for Photoshop Album and too frequent program hangs. Photoshop Album is a new product so no doubt fixes for these will be available soon.


First, sliced bread, then this.   July 29, 2003
18 out of 18 found this review helpful

I was sceptical about this program when I first saw it. Especially as it was so inexpensive. But it is a real gem. I have several thousand photographs, videos and audio clips on my hard drives. After years of computerised chaos when it comes to finding photographs and videos that I know I have ‘somewhere’ ... I can now find them all in a trice. Having created about thirty or so ‘tags’ I can find or just browse them all with just two clicks of the mouse. Even without using search tags, the timeline is always available, this make browsing an absolute joy.
So far my new digital camera has produced about three gigabytes of data; Album is coping effortlessly with that and more. Often a digital picture needs no more than cropping and colour/contrast correction. Album does that in seconds plus always saves your original file as a ‘digital negative’ in case you want to return to it later. The sheer speed of cataloguing, editing and browsing won me over, that and the instant on-screen shows.