Entered CNET Catalog: 01/08/2003
SKU: 29170000
Manufacturer: Adobe Systems
Manufacturer description
Adobe Photoshop Album, state-of-the-art software for Windows-based computers - for the first time extends the legendary Photoshop brand to the consumer market. With digital camera sales exploding, consumers - freed from the expense and limitations of film - have made digital picture-taking an integral part of every family occasion and event. Photoshop Album solves the biggest problem facing these digital camera owners: how to easily find, fix, share and preserve thousands of photos accumulating on their computers. Photoshop Album leaves the competition behind by using an easy and sophisticated "tagging" system to organize and find images, and leverages Photoshop software's unrivalled image enhancement technology to provide simple, high-quality one-click editing. In addition, Photoshop Album is the only consumer digital photography product to take advantage of the ubiquity of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), creating an intuitive way to share digital photos with family and friends. Adobe Photoshop Album gathers thousands of digital photos for viewing in one convenient place - the photo well - and automatically organizes them by date. From there, it's simple to find a particular photo: a timeline view displays photos taken over a period of time, while a detailed calendar view shows the exact day and month when each moment was captured. Users can bring precise control over finding and working with specific collections of photographs through Photoshop Album software's powerful tagging system. Visual tags can be created to instantly find photos of favorite people, places, events, or any other subject, no matter how large the collection becomes. Photos don't always turn out exactly as planned, so Photoshop Album provides one-click editing tools to fix common problems, such as red-eye, color, contrast and brightness. For more advanced editing, Photoshop Album provides single-click integration for users of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, Adobe's award-winning image-editing software for photo hobbyists and amateur photographers. And perhaps most importantly, Photoshop Album is equipped with one-click photo backup to CD and DVD to ensure that memories will be preserved for future generations. Photoshop Album software helps users tell and share the stories of their lives in pictures through entertaining slide shows that can include captions, video clips, and background music. These template-based slide shows are packaged in Adobe PDF, so that Photoshop Album users can deliver their images to anyone who is using free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. With over half a billion copies of this software already distributed across multiple platforms, Photoshop Album eliminates the guesswork of which format should be used to save and share photos - and whether recipients will be able to view them. Adobe Photoshop Album offers prints and other professional photo services through direct links to online service providers, and an easy-to-follow wizard helps users create cards, calendars, albums, Web photo pages, and even 3D Web galleries with just a few clicks of the mouse. Online services may vary worldwide. Adobe has integrated Intel processor optimizations in Photoshop Album, enabling consumers to see improved performance when running the software on Intel processor-based computers.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 10/06/2003
Last year's Photoshop Album debut was less than thrilling. While the software skillfully sorted images, performance problems bogged it down. But for version 2.0, Adobe cleared out the junk to deliver a much better program for organizing and sharing digital photos and video clips.
Just as before, Photoshop Album automatically nabs all the shots on your hard drive and organizes them chronologically. It can also create and track proxy thumbnails of pictures stored on removable media, such as CDs. You can browse your library by clicking a month in the Timeline or sifting through the revamped Calendar. Album also records your management actions and lets you search by events in your photos' history. For example, to call up everything you've sent to a Web photofinisher, you simply select Find > By History > Items Ordered Online.
 To help you track down photos, Album remembers how you use them. Check out all the options in the Find menu. |
For more precise sorting, Adobe's tagging system lets you enter detailed information about your shots. For example, let's say you've just uploaded a bunch of pictures from your son Charlie's birthday party. To make them all easily identifiable, you can create the new keywords Charlie and birthday, then drag them onto the whole batch. New to version 2.0 is the ability to e-mail tags along with photos, so your friends and family can benefit from all your hard organizational work.
All of the first version's basic editing tools remain in Album 2.0. Newbies who aren't sure how to correct bad pictures can quickly clean them up with one-click fixes for lighting, color, and focus. But if you want to make more-complicated edits, you're out of luck. Album 2.0 is an organizer--not an editor. On the plus side, Adobe does allow you to export a photo to the image editor of your choice and import it back in a flash, so you can make your tweaks without mucking up your organization.
Once you've cleaned up your shots, you have plenty of ways to share them. With the Creations Wizard, just a few clicks can produce a video CD, a greeting card, an e-card, a calendar, or a Web-friendly gallery. Mobile phones, Palm OS handhelds, and compatible TiVo digital video recorders can now accept your Album pictures. Adobe also added more templates and bumped up the maximum resolution for video CDs. And should your computer crash, Album's built-in backup function will safeguard you from losing everything.
While the improvements aren't mind-blowing, they're incredibly thoughtful and well executed. With its more streamlined interface, Album is now a tight ship. For digital-photo enthusiasts, Album 2.0 is a welcome productivity boon: a tool that both organizes images and maximizes the options for enjoying them.
User opinions
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User Rating: 
8/10
A pretty neat Photo Organizer.
Pros: Well-organized , handy user interface.
Cons: In the newer version it compromises on clarity for the sake of added functionality.
EasyShare. However, this last one has various functionality options I couldnīt find in Adobeīs starter Edition. But, then again, the complete professional edition is probably much more complete than this trial version. I also admmire the sobber design of the appearance, for me, appearance is paramount when it comes to working with photography. After all, you have to live with it all the time youīre performing whatever the task is wether itīs processing digital photos, adding special effects or just putting together your family album,
User Rating: 8/10
Great for Organizing Large Amounts of Pictures
Pros: Intuitive and Flexible Interface Many different ways to categorize and search for photos Great incremental back-up feature
Cons: Can't search by collection and tags simultaneously. Does not support .wma or .wmv formats Can't re-use a name in a tag if it is used by a different tag in a different catagory. Example, if you used "Hawaii" under places, you can't use it to describe an
User Rating: 
5/10
Expect a free update to 3.0
Pros: Has the features you want for a digital photo album
Cons: Sucks memory and very slow. VCD quality compared to others quite bad.
User Rating: 
2/10
Several good ideas, incompletely executed.
Pros: Easy to organize large numbers of photos. Easy bulk operations like changing timezone.
Cons: Features for creating slide shows and websites are awful. Can include "Caption" but not longer "Notes" in slideshow or website (compare to Jasc Photo Album, which offers the option of displaying the brief Caption alone or the Caption and the longer Descri
User Rating: 
6/10
Great, if it's what you really want.
Pros: This program lets you easily organize and caption your photos, and keep the information all in one place, even if you store the pictures on CDs. I love that I can still see every picture I've taken, while only using a fraction of the disk space it would t
Cons: The big con is the price. A relatively simple program shouldn't have a $50 price tag. You're also going to be stuck with Adobe's system of tags, which is annoying, but I decided the benefit of keeping my photos organized by the people in them, the place t
User Rating: 5/10
good, but I fix it quick please
Pros: easy to switch between tumbnails files support for audio and video easy to find pictures the tags are really nice
Cons: since i have all my pics on a removable harddisk, I don't know how to keep the tags to take my hdd to my friends place to show the pics no mac version yet it is sooo slow when I rotate some pictures or when I scroll down to see my picssometimes. and it is
User Rating: 6/10
I have high hopes for version 2.0
Pros: I really love Photoshop, so I was hoping this product would be wonderful. I think the tag idea is great and could benefit web designers, graphic artists, and image companies even. Yet the program lacks the ability to export the tags and categories from
Cons: I have high hopes for the future of this program. I agree with others that this program needs lots of revisions. For instance, who wants to spend an hour catalogueing images with tags when the tags aren't embedded into the picture. Also, if people alre
User Rating: 
4/10
Wait for next release - quality sucks!
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User Rating: 
1/10
Hazardous to Your System
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User Rating: 
7/10
Great features; watch the crashes
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User Rating: 8/10
Love this product
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User Rating: 8/10
Best I've Tried
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User Rating: 5/10
Video CD is not good
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User Rating: 4/10
Wait for the next version, or maybe SEVERAL versions from now
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User Rating: 4/10
Drawback with low RAM free space
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User Rating: 5/10
Excellent when it works
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User Rating: 8/10
Problems with PDF.
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User Rating: 8/10
A good overall product
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User Rating: 6/10
missing folder options
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User Rating: 8/10
Great for organizing & cataloging
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User Rating: 5/10
DOESN'T support video files on CD
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User Rating: 6/10
Good for a 1.0 release
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User Rating: 6/10
Is great when it works
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User Rating: 7/10
Nice interface, still a few bugs
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User Rating: 4/10
bugware
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User Rating: 8/10
nice programs thats even better if u have photoshop 7
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User Rating: 5/10
Great for cute creations, horrible for organization
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User Rating: 7/10
Great product but prone to crashes
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User Rating: 7/10
DOES NOT support network drives - makes a nice program useless
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