Review: Corel Photo Album 6

Like the Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer, Corel Photo Album 6 has a well laid out and logically organised interface.

Tabs provide access to tools for organising, enhancing (basic photo-editing tasks such as cropping, sharpening and ‘quick fix’ among others) and sharing photos, and a fourth adds projects including greetings cards, calendars and CD labels.

You can browse your hard disk for photos, nominate favourite folders, use a calendar layout to view pictures by date, and view recent downloads.

Like Elements, Album allows you to sort photos into collections, so you can organise photos into categories – all the pictures of your dog, for example, without having to move or make copies of the original files.

Album takes this idea a step further with ‘trays’ into which you can drop images that you want to email, print, or upload to a file-sharing service.

Exif info for selected thumbnails is displayed in a tab which has editable fields for the filename, photo title and description.

Other metadata, including the camera info and IPTC fields are displayed, but you can’t edit this. To add keywords you use the Find tab which includes an assign keywords option, as well as tools for adding and editing keywords.

You add keywords by selecting thumbnails then clicking checkboxes in a categorised list. Keywords are written directly to the file, but beware if you’ve previously added keywords to photos with another application, as they will all be deleted.

Corel Photo Album doesn’t give you full-on access to all the metadata in images, but it’s not alone in that.

For most people the ability to add, edit, sort and find keywords – tasks the program is more than capable of accomplishing – is all that’s required.

It’s also available as a Standard Edition bundled free with Paint Shop Pro X – but that version doesn’t include batch processing, video CD and web gallery features.

This article is part of a group test of photo album software
See also
ACDSee 8 Photo Manager
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
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