Digital Home Thoughts: JASC's PaintShop Photo Album

JASC sent me this software several months, but it has sat languishing on my table of review items. I installed it recently and I'm fairly impressed with it so far, but there are a host of glitches with it. Here are some quick thoughts about it and how it compares to my main photo management tools, Picasa 2 and ACDSEE 7.

The installation was quick and painless on my Windows XP system. The program itself takes a few seconds longer to start up than I'd like, but it's not too painful. There's a helpful start up screen that informs you what the software can do, and boy can this application do a lot! The user interface is decent - it was quite easy for me to jump in and started. In addition to the basic tasks of downloading images off the camera and fixing them with basic enhancements, JASC PaintShop Photo Album 5 (they really need a new name for this!) can also create a variety of projects: screen savers (only on the users computer however), prints from Shutterfly, desktop wallpaper, burn CDs of image folders, create a Web gallery, scrapbook album pages, greeting cards, calendars, CD labels, and even a hard cover photo book. The program is certainly ambitious, but they say the devil is in the details, and this software is missing more than a few details.

For the basic tasks of editing, cropping, adjusting, and moving photos around, it performs quite well. It's fairly fast at thumbnail generation, although thumbnails look jagged. The Folder view is where the users does most of the organizing, but it lacks the simple ability to rename a folder. I really liked using the Calendar view, although it was only showing me some of my images until I manually triggered the Catalog function on the My Pictures folder. Why doesn't the software automatically start to build a catalog when the software is first loaded?

The VCD function is much less polished than other areas - after the initial pop-up help window that told me the VCD process had several steps, I was expecting to see a wizard to help guide me though creating a VCD. No such luck - it dumped me to a screen with the images I wanted to put into the VCD, but no other indication of what I was supposed to do next. I managed to stumble through it, but there was no logic to how the buttons are laid out. Audio support is limited to WAV and MP3 - come on, where's the WMA support? There's also no way to see your images in full-screen mode if you want to look at them before removing them. The VCD creation process claims to backs up the original images and creates a PC-compatible slide show in addition to the VCD video file for your DVD player. Unfortunately, when I checked these boxes, burned the VCD, then put it back into my computer, the disc comes up as being completely blank. No PC-compatible slide show, no backed up JPEG images, and no access to the VCD files - which is a first for me. With VCD discs I've created using other software, I've always been able to read the MPEG file at the very least.

Printing is more powerful and complicated than Picasa, but ultimately not as flexible as ACDSytem's FotoSlate, the software I use when I want to print more complicated sheets. For example, you can chose from a wide variety of page layouts, but you can't do something as simple as rotate a portrait picture into the proper orientation - the software places it as a landscape image and crops it to fit. More flexibility here would be welcome.

All is not lost however - there are some real flashes of brilliance in the application. For instance, they've added an option for file sorting called "By Date Taken". Odds are that's the same as "By Date Modified", but "Date Taken" is a more intuitive option, because that's how most people will prefer to look at their pictures (it should be the default rather than File Name). There's also a powerful keyword editor and search tool, so you can create your own key words, assign them to images en masse, and filter based on key words to find the images you want.

The image adjustments are superb - the Quick Fix button does an impressive job of fixing up images (Before > After), much better than what Picasa 1 could do (Picasa 2 has improved greatly upon this though). You also have the manual controls for further image tweaking. The Red Eye function works very well (I've nearly gouged out my eyes in frustration using Picasa's tool because of the lack of zoom feature that works with the Red Eye tool), and the ability to quickly add a border or picture frame around the image adds a "wow" factor that many users will appreciate.

Ultimately, this is a promising application that feels half-done. With Picasa 2 being so fantastic, and free, every other photo management tool on the market has to work that much harder to distance themselves from it. PaintShop Photo Album