Review: Sony Photo Go photo-management software

In response to the demands of the ever burgeoning digital-imaging market, Sony is trumpeting its Photo Go media management suite as just the tool for newbie snappers.

It’s a photo cataloguing and photo-enhancement package that, while being easy to use, doesn’t really do that much. The usual file import and organisation functions feature, with support for numerous file types including Jpeg and Tiff, although Raw is notable by its absence. Movie files, such as Avi, Mov, Mpg and Quicktime are also handled, all showing up as thumbnails in the program’s main window.

There’s the means to optimise stills’ composition via rotate and crop, and a limited number of filters are available in the Edit dialog for the creation of black-and-white and sepia effects.
While you can tweak brightness, contrast, hue and saturation manually, a one-click Auto Adjust button cuts to the chase, although the filter is aggressive so manual adjustments are the better bet.

With shots imported from a folder or attached camera, you can add text tags, rank images, add comments and then print, email or export from within the program, further sorting files via the Views folders in the Media Library.

Aside from a plethora of online mini-tutorials, however, there’s little else to Photo Go. It’s baffling that Sony is charging money for this software when there are titles such as Google Picasa 2, Kodak Easyshare, Corel Snapfire and Faststone Image Viewer available, all of which have more functionality and all of which can be had for free.

It could be that Photo Go is a promotion for Sony’s Imagestation, the software’s default online printing service. You get a coupon for 100 free 4x6in prints with the package, which works out as a $12 (£6) rebate against the $24.95 (£13) purchase price, but does not include international delivery.

Sony will struggle in the UK with what is presumably a software front-end for its American photo-printing venture. There’s simply not enough in Photo Go to justify the asking price.

Also consider:
Google Picassa 2

ACDSee 8 Photo Manager
Powerful organisational tools to manage your photos

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