In his Personal Technology column that appears in today’s Wall Street Journal, Walter Mossberg talks about why he prefers Adobe Photoshop Album for digital photo management on Windows PCs. I looked at the PC photo management software choices a few weeks ago, and chose Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 over Adobe Photoshop Album. But, if you compare Walter Mossberg’s reasoning to mine, you can see that we are most interested in different features. Mossberg says:
The virtual-collections feature is the key to managing your photos without relying on a mastery of Windows folders and files. You can have a virtual album of your trip to Hawaii without worrying about whether all your pictures are in neatly organized folders and subfolders on your hard disk, with names relating to vacations or Hawaii. And virtual albums also spare users from having to be anal enough to add captions or tags to each and every picture.
For a lot of people who are managing a growing collections of digital photos, features like this are the biggest reason to invest in a piece of photo management software, instead of relying on the built-in capabilities of Windows XP.
When I looked at the same software products, I was not as interested in drag-and-drop collection management. I thought quick access to a number of photo touch-up features was a little more important. I was also concerned about the need to create a local database to manage collections that reside on network drives.
Near the end of his review of Photoshop Album, Walter Mossberg mentioned the kind of problems that can develop around the need to maintain a local database for your photos: “{Adobe Photoshop Album} can be sluggish with even a few thousand photos.” This would be a serious consideration for me and my wife, but, it takes a while for many people to build up a library of several thousand digital photos.
I like Walter Mossberg’s analysis of Adobe Photoshop Album, and I think that the features he focuses on are really important to new digital camera owners who are serious about building a well-managed photo library. I would encourage Operation Gadget readers to carefully read both our review and Mossberg’s, decide on the features that matter most to you, and then make your choice.