Review: Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006

Microsoft Digital Image 2006 is available in various editions that include different applications and content, but the photo album application, called Library, is common to them all.

The workspace is mostly given over to a viewing area that displays image thumbnails. A ‘View by pane’ displays folders in an Explorer-style layout.

Initially, this shows only the My Pictures folder; to see the contents of other folders they must be manually added, or you can scan a drive. In one respect, this is a good thing as it keeps things clear and uncluttered, but it also means you can’t browse disks for images.

The thumbnails are resizable and when you hover over them you get an enlarged view complete with keywords and other file info.

This information, along with the caption, a rating, flags that earmark images for review, printing, retouching and other actions, and labels (keywords) appears in a preview pane.

You can enter captions in the preview pane and adding a rating or flags is simply a matter of clicking the appropriate icon.

Adding keywords is done in a Label editor dialogue box, which lists all the available labels split into four categories – keywords, people, places and events. A useful ‘Library Painter’ window allows you to assign multiple labels to thumbnails.

Library displays existing keywords and doesn’t overwrite them, but labels added in Library aren’t appended to the image file itself, so if you send the file elsewhere it won’t retain the Library labels.

The ‘View by label’ option filters images, displaying only those that have the labels whose checkboxes are ticked in the pane view.

Library doesn’t provide a convenient way to view all a photo’s Exif data in one place. To do this you must display the properties dialogue box.

Generally speaking, the Library interface, which relies heavily on dialogue boxes, is not its strongest asset.

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
Serif Album Plus 4
IPTC and keywords

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