Review: Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

Although many people will think of Photoshop Elements 4.0 as a photo-editing application it’s also, in equal measure, a photo organiser.

In fact, it’s really two tightly integrated applications, an editor and an organiser.

Adobe also produces a product called Photo Album 2.0. When it was first launched, Album shared many features of Photoshop Elements’ Organizer program, but it hasn’t been updated for a couple of years now.

Although it’s cheaper than Elements, it falls a long way behind in terms of features.

Editing tools aside, one of the Elements Organizer’s biggest assets is its interface, which makes easy work of viewing and sorting large photo collections.

As well as the default browser view, which displays resizable thumbnails, there’s a date view that overlays images on a calendar-style display.

Tags are conveniently grouped into categories, you can create your own and to apply them you just drag and drop. For applying people tags, the Elements Organizer has a nifty new feature called ‘Find faces for tagging’ which does exactly what it says.

When it has searched though a folder of photos, all of those that show people’s faces are opened in a separate window ready for tagging.

Searching for tagged photos is similarly straightforward using the same pane from which the tags are applied.

To search for all images with a particular tag you just click its checkbox. You can search for multiple tags and if it can’t find an exact match, Elements shows you those photos that come close to matching your search criteria.

Other features, such as the slideshow, full-screen and side-by-side views, version stacking and the ability to easily change the camera date and time stamp, have the feel of something designed in response to the real needs of photo enthusiasts.

Even if you never edit photos, it’s worth buying just for the organiser features.

This article is part of a group test of photo album software
See also
ACDSee 8 Photo Manager
Corel Photo Album 6
Google Picasa 2
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Serif Album Plus 4
IPTC and keywords

The table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above