Review: Serif Album Plus 4

In stark contrast to ACDSee 8 Photo Manager, Serif Album Plus 4, which is only available with Serif’s image-editing application Photo Plus 10, is a model of simplicity.

Simplicity that stems not from a sleek, well-crafted interface, but rather from a basic lack of features.

Serif Album Plus has four view modes – album, year, month and date. The first of these displays all of the images in the album, and if you’ve used the search feature to add everything on your hard disk this could amount to a lot of photos.

The remaining three are variations of the calendar feature. For some reason the year and month views swap the areas of the screen allocated to thumbnail display with the smaller pane on the left, devoting nearly all of the screen to a massive calendar display, leaving you to squint at tiny image thumbnails.

Date view displays everything in chronological order with photos taken on the same day split into groups.

The fact that most of the time you’re dealing with your entire album and that you can’t view images from individual folders on your hard disk makes any kind of task, be it adding tags, creating a slideshow, or searching for photos, rather unwieldy.

That Album Plus lacks any kind of temporary, or permanent storage, like ACDSee’s baskets, or Adobe Elements’ and Corel Photo Album’s collections makes this even more of a serious issue.

Adding and searching for tags is done in Album view using the checkbox method that is common in other applications but, other than displaying a small subset of the camera data (camera model and exposure details), Exif data is all but ignored.

The existing keywords in our test images were not overwritten, but neither were they displayed anywhere in Album Plus.

Given the advanced level of editing tools available in Photo Plus 10, it’s disappointing that the companion album software is so limited.

This article is part of a group test of photo album software
See also
ACDSee 8 Photo Manager
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Corel Photo Album 6
Google Picasa 2
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
IPTC and keywords

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