Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

The whole point is to get images into albums as quickly and as painlessly as possible. In that regard, I really loved Media Center Plus from Jasc because it has a feature that lets me just pull all my photos into one huge album and inserting photos is as easy as selecting an album. Well, I loved it until we tried out the Adobe Photoshop Album which is even more automatic and has more features for working in subsets of the big catalog. The program is designed to create one huge catalog of photos.

Jasc After Shot likewise has a very easy approach to creating album—you can just click on a folder too, but it doesn't seem to let you create one huge album. Also, I lost track of audio files that were recorded with images.

Another important feature for file generation is the easy ability to change the names of files in a group. Ulead's Photo Impact Album does not let you do this in a group. Or I didn't figure it out by the time we wrote this. In After Shot, it's easy to create a series such as San Jose Trip-001, San Jose Trip-002, etc. There are days when naming each and every file becomes a real pain and this is a simple expedient.

Organization

Back to the idea of one master file: working within a master file in Adobe Photo Album lets users annotate thumbnails, and play with images, create slide shows. etc. Also, within the main catalog, users can use one large album as a starting point to select groups of images for smaller albums according to theme. etc. This is the way I want to work and it seems practical in professional applications where people might want a picture of a beach or a picture of Jen-Hsun Huang, or a computer. The ability to easily create multiple tags and keywords and then sort pictures with them is critical. Ulead Photo Impact Album doesn't let users select a group of pictures and add keywords and neither does Jasc's After Shot. In After Shot keywords are assigned to photos one at a time. In addition, photos can be identified as belong to groups such as locations, people, etc., and those identifiers can be set up by the user. It's an approach that requires forethought and doesn't allow much spontaneity.

Ulead's Album has a similar feature except identifiers and keywords can be assigned to groups of photos in the catalog view. While it forces users to consistently enter information and results in a well organized file, it's just tedious enough to prevent people from actually using the feature. The process of adding keywords, names, titles, etc., to images in Photo Impact Album requires users to open a separate window to add field data and again, this is done on a photo-by-photo basis.

The Photoshop Album shows images in a window and they're smaller than we'd like, especially when pictures are being evaluated for publication.

Photo Impact Album requires a little meditation and quiet thought to figure out how to acquire thumbnails, but it's a powerful tool when used in conjunction with Ulead's PhotoImpact. However, most people like to work with several photo imaging software tools. PhotoImpact Album grudgingly lets you associate file extensions like .jpg and .tiff with other programs such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but Media Center and also After Shot let you have multiple associations so that I can select a thumbnail and choose from a list of editors. After Shot adds a cute little launch bar at the bottom of the screen.

After Shot is also fairly easy in that I can just make a folder an album, but, I find it incredibly frustrating that I can't delete an image from an album without deleting it from my drive—at least that's the way it seems to me at the moment. In that regard, Photo Impact, or just about any other program is much better. It's easier to move thumbnails between albums.

Stitching

After Shot adds stitching courtesy of Enroute software. It's nice to be able to look at candidates for stitching inside the photo album, select them and ask for them to be stitched, but the software is pretty minimal—and in some cases this is a good thing. If you just took a couple of photos you want to stitch for a panorama, this is just fine. If there's a lot of fine tuning required to line up shots or you want to make a 360 degree panorama, this is not the tool for you. However, I find that most often I just want to stitch two or three pictures.

Editing and file conversion

Jasc Media Center has nice editing features inside the program and it has nice batch features for converting photos from one format to anothe—and it supports lots of formats. It has kind of an alarming way of taking off on batch processes, however.

With After Shot you can also apply Quick Fix and reduce colors for Web work but there are no controls for fine tuning (and if you're rash enough to apply these two functions to pictures in thumbnail mode, you can't undo it). You take what you get.

Editing should be something that can be done (and undone) easily. We do a lot of resizing, cropping, and color balancing and contrast/brightness adjustment. Adobe Photoshop seems to be sending us to Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for too many simple procedures. Likewise Photo Impact Album wants you to work in Photo Impact, a darned fine editing software but I'd rather have the freedom to go where I choose and for simple tasks I'd prefer to stay in the album. This is the same issue with the Roxio all-in-one package, but I hesitate to group it with the others since its real job is to create CDs.

After Shot has kind of a goofy cropping tool that assumes you will crop according to standard photo sizes. However, I'm often cropping images for publication and not for print output so I find myself overriding this feature frequently. Also, and I suppose this is a quibble, but the feature offers a dialog box with borders rather than the customary dotted line and so I'm never quite sure where the boundary of my crop actually is on the bottom. The other programs handle cropping the way I expect. Adobe Photo Album has quite a few nice editing features although it also assumes you'll be shelling out to PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements for "real" editing. It's got nice slider bars for contrast, balance, lighting, color saturation, etc., but I can't do it all because it doesn't have resize. Also, PhotoShop Album saves the edited file with a new name but the state and the relationship of the original file to the corrected file is mysterious. It seems as if the original has dropped out of the catalog after editing (but I have found them in the Windows file directory so they're not gone, just not where I expect in the catalog).

Rotation is another feature and I have issues to bring up here with both Jasc After Shot and Media Center. Media Center opens images in slide show view, not in an editable window and it allows rotation of 90-, 180-, and 270- degrees. It doesn't let me rotate the .1 degree I often have to perform because I wasn't holding the camera straight. (It's always .1 degree left—I don't know why.) Neither does Adobe Photo shop album—again Adobe just thinks you'll be happier working in Photoshop.

Web page generation

Both of the Jasc products have the ability to create HTML pages from albums or groups of photos. The Media Center's approach is pretty bare bones and is designed for people who understand working with HTML but don't want to fuss with it. You get a pretty basic page that you can then edit in another program. The Jasc After-Shot has nice templates for the creation of web pages and thus its suitable for people with a more tenuous understanding of HTML. On the other hand, we found ourselves dissatisfied with the Web options offered us. We found it hard to add comments and annotations to the pictures in the HTML file. But still, we thought this was a pretty swell feature and one we'd use. Also After Shot is associated with the Shutterfly subscription service, allowing users to create photo sites with links for friends and families.

Ulead's PhotoImpact also has a web creation feature and while it is fairly rigid in the styles of pages that can be created. On the other hand, it's pretty easy and efficient. The same process can be used to create web pages or package to CDs.

Other things you never thought you'd want to do

The Adobe Photo Album lets you create calendars, PDF files of photo album pages, and burn to CD. You can also send photos out for prints. Photo Album also helps out with simple tasks most people don't need help on such as optimizing photos for email in PDF albums or as smaller JPEGs. As we said, After Shot is unique in adding stitching capabilities but it's a feature we use a lot. It's nice to be able to see potential photos to stitch already all lined up in the thumbnail view. Also, we really like After Shot's calendar feature. After Shot has a save to CD but it requires that the CD be formatted and ready to go using other software. Media Center has the same restriction. We'd rather go to Roxio's One Stop approach (except that we tend to get a lot of crashes).

Adding Audio

Audio annotations can be added to shots in an album or After Shot accommodates audio files that are captured with images by some cameras. The audio capabilities on all of these programs leave a lot to be desired. It would be nice to just specify an MP3 file and add it to an album for a slide show since most of us have tons of MP3 files but not much in the way of .wav or midi unless we're serious musicians or hobbyists. But, .wav or midi is what After Shot and Photo Impact Album want and even then it's not easy to get the music and the images to play together—let alone in synch. After Shot adds audio as an annotation. If you want to add an audio track, the best thing to do is export a QuickTime movie from After Shot (a darned nice feature, by the way) and then edit it with video software. Media Center by Jasc is even less cooperative on this front. It simply allows for a CD to be played along with a slide show.

Slide Shows

This is a minimal requirement and all the products enable this feature. We thought that Adobe's Photoshop Album was the clunkiest in this regard and that the Media Center was the best. But all the programs do just fine at this basic task.

Summary

So which one will I keep on my computer? I haven't quite made the decision yet. But I have come up with a checklist. I want to write image files to a CD, I like having an easy Web page generator, and I prefer as much automation as possible in the collection of digital media. For that reason. I tend to want to keep the Adobe Photoshop Album because it is hands-down the easiest tool for pulling in digital content, naming it, adding keywords, sorting, etc. And, isn't that what it's all about? Well, yes, but I have found that I really like the bells and whistles. The Jasc After Shot software is the easiest to work with if you want to create a Web page, or slide show, and there are choices for page design that are not cheesy—though there's plenty of cheese as well. There are some customization options, but truly, we are talking about software that let's you get the job done quickly—get a portfolio page up immediately for a client to see. Get pictures to the family in an instant, etc., and with a format that's tasteful if not personalized. The Photo Impact Album has much better controls for the creation of a slide show. And it's much easier to manipulate photos within the album. It's not quite as intuitive and easy as Media Center from Jasc but it's a very close second. First and foremost, the Roxio package is designed for burning CDs and DVDs, but so far, the burning process has not been real easy. If I rename a photo in another program it is lost to the Roxio organizer. That's not so bad, but then if I try and burn a CD and Roxio gets upset about a missing photo, for example, it just freezes up.

In fact, the scope of this article does not cover one of the most significant programs of organizing software and that's disorganized users. What happens when you move images around on an office LAN or burn CDs? This is where it's critical to settle on one program and work within it. It's not going to eliminate these problems, but it's going to give you a fighting chance.

It would be swell if these programs were compatible so that I could open albums in any program and then use the tools I want. Then I would create the album and annotate my pictures in Photoshop Album, I'd create photo web pages with Jasc AfterShot, write CDs with Roxio, handle batch processes with Photo Impact or AfterShot. In general you can't do this. For instance when I made an album in Ulead's Album software and changed names in AfterShot, the new names were not updated in Ulead and in fact, the program couldn't find the files. Rather, I had to recreate the album. In general the same types of problems turn up in all these products.

But, in the real world there is not much impetus for these companies to come together to create a standard interface for albums. The company who can capture a significant share of the professional market will have an edge in this department. Adobe, by virtue of its long dominance in the field is the front runner but in our opinion the Album program has several quirks that will not thrill professionals.

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