A couple of days ago, I offered new digital camera owners some advice on photo management. Among other things, I suggested that they "get a good piece of digital photo management software" for their personal computer and "don't print every photo" kept on the camera.

I offered Apple iPhoto 2 as an example of good digital photo management software. The biggest problem with iPhoto 2 is that it only runs on Apple Macintosh computers. Is their some software package that compares with iPhoto 2 for Windows PCs?

There are several potential choices. The one that I like best is Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4. It's from a company that makes a number of image editing, storage, and manipulation tools, and their products are generally known for a good balance between ease-of-use and power. I use Jasc Paint Shop Pro, a competitor to products like Adobe Photoshop that has 80-90 percent of the power, but is a lot easier to use.

Jasc Photo Album 4 is the same kind of product. It doesn't have as polished a user interface as iPhoto 2 or some competing products on the PC like Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0, but Jasc Photo Album 4 has more quick image touch-up features. Photo Album 4 also doesn't have an annoying problem that Photoshop Album has, namely, that you need to create a database on your local hard drive to manage photos on a shared network drive. This is not a problem for some people, but is an important consideration at my house.

I like Photo Album 4. It looks like it would meet my needs. There's a more complete review available on CNET. If you have a product you like better than this Photo Album, feel free to comment and tell us about it.