Adobe Photoshop Album

As the name would suggest, this is, quite simply, a tool for organising your photos. Fire it up, let it trawl your drives, or import pictures from a camera, and they'll be neatly indexed by date.

A calendar strip running along the top of the screen lets you scroll back and forth chronologically, and you can add descriptive tags to define categories and themes, which makes finding your images far easier.

In effect, then, it's a visual database and, apart from its simple image correction tools, it has little in common with Photoshop beyond a shared name.

Editing is limited to colour correction, sharpening, brightness and a range of automated options where Album will decide the best settings for each picture.

Unfortunately the editing window is fairly small and can't be expanded to make best use of your monitor, which on a smaller screen can induce squints on a side-by-side before and after preview.

You can, of course, send your images to an external editing application and on our test system it recognised, not surprisingly, Photoshop Elements 2.0.

Photoshop Album also takes responsibility for looking after your originals. Altered images are saved with '_edited' appended to the filename, and the original kept out of harm's way.

A small collection of creativity tools will produce calendars, photo albums and 3D web galleries.

Album is a godsend for the terminally disorganised. On our test PC, after we'd opted to exclude pictures smaller than 100KB to avoid everything in the browser cache, it found 934 images, many of them long forgotten.

Files can be viewed as thumbnails or full-size and can be captioned, giving the search tools more power.

It's a slim offering that does what it promises but little more.

Contact: Adobe 020 8606 4001
www.adobe.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, XP (ran fine on Windows 98 on our test system)
• 128MB of Ram (256MB recommended)
• 150MB of free hard drive space
• Internet Explorer 5.0 or above
• Monitor capable of 256 colours at 800 x 600 resolution
• CD-Rom drive