Cyberlink Mediashow 6 Deluxe review

Cyberlink Mediashow 6 Deluxe is a program designed to manage, edit and share photos and videos but, since many of these features are included with Windows anyway (or available free, courtesy of programs such as Google’s Picasa), it needs to do more to justify the price.

In fact, we prefer it to the way Windows deals with photos and videos because it’s quicker at creating a catalogue of all your content for easy browsing. It also has a sleek and satisfying interface that works more intuitively than either Windows Live Photo Gallery or the latest version of Picasa. The only quirk with the interface is that the Back button isn’t always in the same place but this is only a minor inconsistency.

Read more: media editing software reviews

Mediashow scans your Pictures and Videos folders (or your alternatives if you don’t use the standard Windows folders for these files) and catalogues new content as it appears. It’s also easy to add new folders on the fly and restrict the size of pictures and videos to greater than 50KB or 500KB respectively. This avoids cataloguing uselessly tiny images or video clips.

Pictures can be arranged and viewed by folder, faces, date and tags, or you can view your most recently imported batch. There are also some basic photo-fixing features. While some, such as the batch re-size tool, are useful they are limited compared with alternatives such as Photoshop Elements.

You can share photos on Facebook and Flickr, videos on YouTube and the program will convert videos so they play on many portable devices such as the iPhone, iPod, PS3 and PSP.

It can produce good photo slideshows (with captions, titles and music) and save them in various formats (including MP4 and WMV) and create DVDs and Blu-ray discs (the last two are only available in the more expensive Ultra version).

One handy way of finding photos is by date. The monthly calendar has thumbnails on the days that photos were taken and a button, and slider overlay appears when you hover over a thumbnail – drag the slider and each successive picture in the folder is displayed.

As well as allowing you to look inside the folder without opening it, this also makes it possible to choose a specific thumbnail to represent the contents. Face tagging is not only faster than before, but is also more accurate than Picasa’s face recognition.

Facebook integration makes it easy to create albums and upload photos to the social network, or download all the images you have previously uploaded.

We’re less convinced by the support for 3D photos and videos, which feels gimmicky.