Adobe Photoshop Album

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.

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.