Digital Home Thoughts: Finding That Perfect Photo is Much Easier with Hemera Photo Objects

You know those little featured review graphics I make every couple of days? Quite often, I can't find an appropriate product image to use in the graphic, so I turn to a very useful tool that I wanted to tell everyone about: Hemera Photo Objects. If you have any sort of Web site, make any sort of printed newsletter, design anything in HTML, or do PowerPoint presentations on a regular basis, this tool will be very useful to you. Photo objects are objects that can be placed seamlessly on any type of background and look perfect. They are pre-masked, which means they are "cut out" and can be dropped into any image and look like they belong. Excellent! Keep reading to learn more about this handy tool.

Hemera has released their third collection of 50,000 images, so with all three I have a massive collection of 150,000 images to search through. I can normally find what I need from that collection, but if I can't, their desktop software search tool can tap into several online collections to further broaden your results.

I've been using Hemera Photo Objects for several years now, and I can honestly say (with no amount of exeggeration) that next to Ulead PhotoImpact, this is the most vital tool I have in creating Web graphics. Years ago, I used to buy clipart collections, photo collections, and any other sort of graphics resource I could find, just in case one day I needed a certain image. The problem was, I never used them - the search tools were atrocious on every product I tried. What's the point of having 1 milllion clipart images if you can't quickly find what you need and export it? The Hemera search tool is amazing - you simply start typing the keyword you want to search for, and it brings up the image thumbnails immdiately. I typed in "cell phone" and within seconds had 1490 different images of cell phones, people holding cell phones, etc.

If I had any criticism of the Hemera packages in general, it would be that they don't bundle a DVD version in the box: you have to wait 6+ months (usually) for them to release the DVD version. Swapping seven CDs is no fun - DVDs were designed for this type of use. I'd be a happy guy if they'd just include a DVD version in the box - I doubt it would cost them more than an extra 50 cents anyway. Also, the three collections don't really play well together - I once received some very complicated instructions on how to get them to all see each other, but I wasn't able to make it all work together. I wish it was as easy as installing the browser client and then importing all the data. Yes, I'd be willing to set aside 10 GB just for these photo objects!

All in all, I'm always excited whenever I see a new collection being released, and I highly recommend this product to anyone that needs to create graphics on a regular basis and requires a pool of images to draw from. If you're interested in purchasing any of the Hemera collections, Amazon.com sells them all online but I've also seen them at many local computer stores. [Affiliate]