I have yet to find a digital photo album program that completely satisfies me, but Mac FlipAlbum Suite 3 comes close, and with a little fine-tuning, it might even persuade the “Creative Memories” crowd to abandon scissors and tape in favor of trons.

FlipAlbum’s main virtue is that it does one thing well: it collects your photos into a virtual album that you can share with family and friends either through creating CDs or printing pages. The instruction book guides you through the easy installation process, suggests several of ways to import photos from iPhoto or other digital image shoe-boxes, and walks you through the basics of creating your first album. Once you get familiar with the toolbar, you will be able to quickly arrange selected images to tell your story. A basic album will take about an hour to assemble and burn to a CD which will play on either a Mac or Windows PC. This cross-platform compatibility is great.

With a little more time and effort, you can paste multiple images onto a single page and get fancy with your layout. But this is a laborious process: I recommend the next FlipAlbum upgrade include a selection of multi-image page templates so you can easily drag-and-drop two, three, or even four pictures onto a page, as you can with Apple’s iPhoto 5. FlipAlbum’s image enhancement tools are limited to basics like crop and rotate: you really should doctor your images in another program (like iPhoto or Photoshop Elements) before importing them to FlipAlbum.

The headline feature of the program is the on-screen 3-D page flipping (with sound effects). Cool. And certainly different from the ubiquitous digital slide shows. Now, I’d also like a virtual paperweight to hold down the pages so they won’t flip back and forth while I am doing creative layout. Manipulating the annotation text box for captions (positioning it, resizing it, changing text appearances) was a fiddly process... occasionally the program just up and quit, unusual behavior in MacLand. Maybe it got frustrated with my obsessive need to label every picture. However, this didn’t seem to be a big problem: I was always able to restart the program and resume work in short order. The “help” menu takes you to an electronic version of the user guide and a short FAQ list. Online tech support via e-mail provided answers to my questions within 24-48 hours.

The range of album covers and page templates is surprisingly limited and artistically limited. Some of the selections were odd: “fur” and “metallic” for instance--but no “leather.” If the folks at E-book Systems seriously want to appeal to scrap-bookers, and move them from paper to digital mediums, they need to create a wider selection of attractive album cover and page templates for the next upgrade of the program, or make them available as a downloadable add-ons from their website. For instance, the album theme menu needs to be expanded to include sports other than baseball, and some of the major holidays: Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving and July 4th. Graduation and weddings also merit a theme package. The page preferences should include parchment, linen and watermarked backgrounds. I love the ability to put captions on my photos, but I’d also like to add borders and “quote balloons.”

Mac FlipAlbum Suite 3 is a great way to quickly organize and share digital snapshots with captions with family and friends, but until the selection of templates is expanded, it won’t fully satisfy a hard-core scrap-booker