We are drowning in digital images because we have a Minolta DiMAGE X camera that is so light and small that we have it with us almost all of the time. It sometimes disappears in my pocket book. We operate all our computers with a shell called PowerDesk and we are careful to make sure that each "roll" of images is uploaded with a unique folder names. Hence we can use the date stamp of PowerDesk to help find the images we are interested in and we can use its viewer to rapidly scan down the image files once we have identified a desired folder. We can also use several of our image editors to show a folder's thumbnail views that we can eyeball. When an image is interesting, we can enlarge it for further use.
Now we can now supposedly do better and do it easier with organizer image album tools that provide beautified, simplified operations and new functions. This relatively new form of software is designed for the novice consumer and is priced under $50. We wanted to see what such software could do, so we purchased Jasc PaintShop Photo Album 4,
http://www.jasc.com. As a major new function, this software purported to make it far easier for us to send reduced-resolution images to our less-well-endowed dialup friends. It also advertised the ability to stitch together several photographs in a panorama scene using sophisticated pattern matching. We were curious about how well all of this worked.
Installation ease, or lack thereof, is always a consideration, especially when you have other software and other software relationships on your computers that you want to preserve. Jasc's installation was very about asking us if we want to associate all our jpeg files this new software. This would have meant that, whenever we encounter a jpeg file, it would be brought up with this software. It was nice of them to ask. We declines, though, since we have other, more-sophisticated image editing programs that we prefer to associate with our image files. It is increasingly important, in fact essential, to not just breeze past these installation screens, but rather to actually make conscious choices. We recently spent hours debugging a hidden association that slowed down our laptop's display of images by more than a factor of 10. We had allowed it to always create Photoshop thumbnails. Also, in the age of being spammed at almost 50%, be careful what email you agree that you want to receive. Jasc was very clear about choices and what they could send us if we opted in. Although we have not yet used this software extensively, it does appear that the installation did not clobber anything else on our computer. We would give their installation a very high rating.
