Adobe Photoshop Album is Walter Mossberg's Preferred PC Photo Management Software
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.
Comments
for the past two years i've been using the built-in windows xp features to manage my photos and i can't complain. of course, mossberg's article has me beginning to think that photo management software would be good. dave, what do you think are some of the benefits of the software if you're not using networked drives? i do a fairly good job keeping things in order with different folders. are there features that aren't being mentioned in reviews of these products that would help me do more than that? an additional program that only manages photos just seems like an extra hassle at this point.
Posted by: marc | January 22, 2004 12:27 PM
Marc:
I'm sorry I let a week go by before responding to your question.
Some people use digital photo library management software to take advantage of photo tagging, so that you can rapidly locate all of your beach photos, for example, regardless of which trip each photo is from. Of course, in order to take advantage of this, you have to go through your collection and add tags.
Another thing that has been coming out recently is time-based organization. Some of the software out there lets you view your collection through a calendar interface. This would be a nice-to-have for me, because I have burned CDs in the past for family that recapped "the year in pictures."
If I were adding photo library management software to my repertoire, I would import the photos into the software and take advantage of as many out-of-the-box features as I could. I would add tags to photos as I looked at them in the future. So, over time the library would be more searchable.
You really have to take a look at the features of each software product designed to manage digital photo libraries, and decide if the features justify the added expense and organizational time. It's really a matter of personal preferences.
Posted by: Dave Aiello | January 29, 2004 10:13 AM