|
DIGITAL
photo album programs can seem like tourist snapshots of
the Washington Monument: At first, they all look alike.
Each of
these programs can index every photo you’ve taken and
make the usual fixes—correcting red eye and cropping
pictures to the right size. Then they invite you to post
the results to the Web, e-mail them to friends or crank
out hard copies from your printer.
These
programs, however, aren’t commodities. In a market
without any entrenched monopoly—thank Microsoft for
including such limited photo-management tools in Windows
XP—their developers have had to work to grab people’s
attention.
As one
result, most of these programs are free. Some come from
firms that can easily profit from your photography in
other ways—digital camera manufacturers and
photo-sharing web sites—but one of the most popular does
not.
That
one, Google’s Picasa, remains the best photo album
program for Windows and the closest thing to Apple’s
Mac-only iPhoto. But a test of four other free photo
managers—Adobe’s Photoshop Album Starter Edition,
Hewlett-Packard’s Photosmart Essential, Kodak’s
EasyShare and Preclick’s Preclick Gold—shows that
Picasa’s competitors have worthy ideas of their own and
may be a better fit for some users.
These
programs set themselves apart by how they gather your
photo files. If you’ve already sorted your pictures into
folders, stick to Picasa (picasa.com) or EasyShare (www.kodak.com/go/easyshare/).
The others ignore prior attempts at organization and
show your photos by date only.
Picasa
also works well for people in the habit of writing
captions for their photos, thanks to its fast,
comprehensive search function.
Then
consider how you’d like to organize your pictures. If
you remember your pictures by when you took them, you
may prefer the simple timeline and calendar views of
Photoshop Album Starter Edition (adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/starter.html).
But if
you’re less chronologically minded and instead recall
photos by such criteria as who, where and what, you’ll
appreciate the way Photosmart (hp.com/go/pse) and
Photoshop Album Starter—like Google’s Gmail Web-mail
site—let you tag photos with multiple labels.
All
these programs offer tools to fix your phtos, but each
leaves out one useful ingredient or another.
Each
program includes a one-click automatic fix and also lets
you rotate and crop photos, fix red-eye effects—Photosmart
had the best interface for this task, but Preclick (preclick.com)
and Photoshop Album delivered more natural-looking
results. They all can transform color shots into
black-and-white or sepia-tone images. In addition,
EasyShare, Photoshop Album and Photosmart gave a helpful
before-and-after view of each edit.
Picasa
provided the broadest set of editing tools, including a
useful “straighten” option to level out the horizon in
your shots. EasyShare was not far behind, thanks to a
palette of visual effects that can make a photo look
like a cartoon or coloring-book illustration.
Preclick
was least useful in this role. On the other hand, it’s
the only program in this bunch that still claims to run
on pre-2000 versions of Windows.
Picasa
and Photosmart gave the most help with printing by
clearly previewing their page-layout options. The other
programs took a less obvious, menu-driven approach.
Avoid
Photosmart for e-mail, though; it didn’t scale down
photos before sending, resulting in three-megabyte
messages. EasyShare and Photoshop Album also had issues:
The former required sending photo messages through the
EasyShare site instead of my mail program, and the
latter wanted to convert attached photos to Adobe’s
Portable Document Format.
For web
sharing, these five programs only offered three choices
among them. Preclick and Photosmart both publish photos
to HP’s Snapfish site, EasyShare and Photoshop Album
Starter connect to Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery, and Picasa
uploads photos to Google’s Picasa Web Albums.
If
you’re already attached to one of these sites, that
factor alone may determine your choice of program. (In
this category of software, programs typically link to
only one photo-sharing site.)
If not,
bear in mind that Snapfish requires every visitor to
sign in to view your photos, while EasyShare and Picasa
don’t demand that potentially annoying step.
EasyShare provides unlimited storage but will erase your
online albums if you don’t buy something off the site
once a year. No purchase is required at Picasa, but that
site caps your use at one gigabyte; storing more photos
online will cost you $25 a year or more.
Beyond
the lack of a dominant competitor, the other interesting
aspect of this market is the simple looks of these
programs. Photosmart seems nearly interface-free, with
only a few, big buttons on most screens. Preclick
abandons traditional menus, and even EasyShare,
Photoshop Album Starter and Picasa barely resemble most
image editors.
Too many
commercial software developers compete over how many
features they can shove in the user’s face instead of
who can present the essential tools in the most elegant
manner. Those firms could learn from photo-sharing
programs. |
