Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Corel's Photo Album 6 (formerly known as Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album) bundles together the most variety of features of any consumer-grade digital image manager -- a file-level manager, slideshow and screensaver module, creative projects (calendars, magazine covers, etc.), backup and archive module; and a basic image editor. Version 6 of Photo Album sports a new interface, some new project templates and backup options, and most importantly, easy-to-use IPTC and EXIF metadata support. The latter feature makes the program well worth the upgrade for prior users, and the best general choice for mainstream users, such as self-appointed family photo archivists, looking to organize and manage their growing collection of digital photographs for posterity. What makes metadata support so important? A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand or remember a picture's content or context. (E.g., When and where was this picture taken? What is this a picture of? Who are these people? Why did I take this picture?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. In an analog photograph, one could write a description on back of the print itself. With digital photos, this sort of information is kept as metadata. Without metadata, that interesting digital photograph (Holiday Party 2005: Roy and Ciara with Mayor Mike. Unbeknownst to Mayor Mike, Roy and Ciara rose to power by wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.) is just another anonymous picture. It is metadata that imbues digital photographs with their context and meaning, and that enables digital photograph collections to be quickly organized or synthesized in a wide variety of ways - by timeline, event, location, person, etc. Prior versions of Photo Album kept metadata locked away inside a proprietary database, usable only inside the program. Corel Photo Album 6's support of IPTC and EXIF metadata relegates product lock-in to the past, and potentially makes your photograph descriptions (complete memory = photograph + metadata) accessible seamlessly across: - online-photo sharing sites that support IPTC and EXIF metadata, such as Fotki and Flickr; - friends, family, or other users who don't use Corel Photo Album 6; - yourself, on other computers, if or when you outgrow Photo Album 6, or the product line is discontinued. That's potentially, because Corel doesn't quite implement IPTC support the way everyone else does. Corel Photo Album 6 is able to view metadata of digital photographs created in Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Also, Photo Album 6 does not support Unicode, so foreign language support (for recording foreign toponyms and friends in your photographs without the need for Romanize them) is limited. However, PA6 is still better than its competitors, who either do not support IPTC or EXIF metadata (leaving you locked into their products), or make it cumbersome to use. Corel Photo Album 6 is worthy of consideration even if you've already purchased a digital photo-editor / image library manager bundle, such as Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006 or Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4. Microsoft's Digital Image Library 11 (part of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006) locks metadata inside its own proprietary database and the Windows XP NTFS file system, usable only on the single computer where the program is installed. DIS2006 users who want to share picture metadata with other users must manually copy and paste it for each picture they want to share. Further, the proprietary nature of DIS2006's database renders it susceptible to breakage - if you change the filename of an image outside the program, the image and its DIS2006 database entry are disassociated. Although Photoshop Elements 4 supports IPTC and EXIF metadata, the program continues to be disjointed - you fill in different pieces of metadata in the photo editor and photo organizer sections of the program. Unfortunately, Corel's Photo Album 6 is just as disjointed. PA6 tracks picture title, description, and keyword information. Corel's photo editor, Paint Shop Pro 10 (equivalent to Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006's or Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4's photo editor; and a separate purchase) is needed to track picture location (city, state, country, etc.) information, among other things. However, Corel Photo Album 6's advantage over Photoshop Elements 4 is that PE4's photo organizer is very unwieldy when managing more than a few hundred photographs. It would be nice to see future versions of Corel Photo Album and Paint Shop Pro share the same metadata management features. Experienced users may look to PixVue, a free Windows Explorer extension, for a full IPTC/XMP metadata editor in the interim. Consumers should understand that given PA6's low price, competitor programs may exceed the depth of any particular module(s) in PA6. For example, ACD System's ACDSee 8 is a better file-level manager. Simple Star's PhotoShow Deluxe 4 has the better slideshow module. With these other choices however, users may find themselves purchasing additional programs to match the breadth of Corel Photo Album 6's functionality. For example, ACDSee 8 Standard lacks a creative projects module, which ACD Systems offers for separate purchase, as FotoSlate 4. Corel has done a very good job with Photo Album 6. It is the best general-purpose choice for both beginning and intermediate mainstream users.