Adobe Photoshop Album 1.0 Review

Share

The Share portion of the application should really be called 'Share / Output' as it covers the final output functions of Album. From Share you can print locally in various formats, order online, share online and e-mail.

Print selected photos - choose individual, contact sheet or 'picture package' at various print sizes and print options

E-mail selected photos - you can output as a PDF slideshow or individual attachments, note that you can choose the size and quality of images before they are output.

Preferences

The preferences dialog allows you to control certain Album settings as well as defaults for the import of images and slideshows.

Catalogs, Archiving and Backup

Album stores its information in a Catalog file (.PSA file extension), by default you are working in the 'My Catalog.psa' catalog but you can choose to have multiple catalogs, save copies of the catalog and even 'Recover' the catalog (essentially a repair and compact option). With multiple images selected you can also archive the original images to a CD or DVD-ROM disc, in doing so you can also choose to optionally take these images offline (only keep a smaller 'proxy' image on your hard disk). Album also supports full Backup and Restore of all of your catalog and contents to either CD / DVD-ROM disc or a separate drive / filesystem.

You can have multiple catalogs and even save copies of the current catalog	Archive selected images to disc, optionally choose to move them 'offline'
Backup the entire catalog and all images to a CD / DVD disc or drive	Restore entire catalog and images from a CD / DVD disc or drive

Conclusion

Overall I'm very impressed with Adobe Photoshop Album. I am aware of other applications out there which can perform similar importing, organizational, browsing or sharing functions but nothing which pulls all of this together in one easy to use application. My gut feeling is that this will appeal to consumers more than some of the other applications out there if only for the simple tagging and extensive output options. Asked to give Album a rating I'd give it a Recommended, there's still some space for development and it would be nice to see a Mac version.