Adobe Photoshop Album 1.0 Review

Organize

You organize images in Album by attaching tags to them. After each import batch the application shows you just those images and thus provides you with an opportunity to begin tagging them. This is the most important (and to some degree most labourious) part of using Album but is required to get the most out of the software.

Three different views are available for tags

Tags are split into four categories: People, Places, Events and Other. Within each category you can create sub-categories (such as 'Asia' under Places, above) and then create Tags under either the main category or sub-categories. Tagging images is simply a case of selecting them and dragging a tag (or tags) to the image. If a tag has not previously been used it will acquire an icon from the first image tagged, this can easily be modified later. One easy way we found to tag was to display images grouped by folder location (if imported from a previously folder organized filesystem) and then click on the folder name to select all images.

Editting a tag Editting the icon assigned to a tag

Find Photos

Photoshop Album has some unique and very easy ways to find images. Firstly you can simply browse through all of your images by either date, import batch (similar to film roll in iPhoto) or folder location (useful if imported from a previously organized filesystem). When browsing by date you can quickly jump to a certain date by clicking on the timeline which runs along the top of the main window. Additionally you can drag the sliders at either end of the timeline to narrow down the range of images shown. Use of the timeline can be combined with any of the other find features described below. Note that in import batch or folder location view the timeline changes.

Timeline, click on a bar to jump to that group of images (by month) or drag the sliders at either end to narrow down the displayed images to a portion of time
Timeline when in sort by 'Folder Location' mode, hover your mouse cursor over a bar to discover the folder name

The best way to find photos is using the tag system, and it really couldn't be easier. Simply click on the Home icon to clear any previous search terms and then click on the empty white 'check box' beside a tag. All the photos with that tag will be shown, you can then combine this with further tags, a date range (by dragging the timeline sliders) or any other criteria. Note that Album will always try to show you the best match if no exact matches are available.

We've selected the People->Jo tag which has now shown all the images with the 'Jo' tag.
Now we drag the 'earliest date' slider of the timeline to February 2002, note that this is also described in the status bar at the bottom of the window.
You can combine as many tags into a search as you like, so now we're asking for all pictures of Jo in Flordia after February 2002. Album indicates 11 exact matches, 196 close matches and 2775 not matching.

Another neat 'find' feature is 'Color Similiarity', to execute this simply drag one or more images into the 'Search Criteria' box at the top of the browse window pane and Album will display images with a similar color match.

A color similarity search such as this can also be combined with other criteria (such as tags)