press release32

Posted at 12:00 noon PST Saturday, Feb. 17, 2001

Digital photo albums a high-tech way of editing, archiving keepsake images

New products let users create family slide shows, put images to music, share photos with others

BY SAM DIAZ
Mercury News

Photographs are about sharing, right? And photo albums are supposed to help organize snapshots
for easier sharing.

But even though our intentions are good, most photos get archived right into a cardboard box
somewhere in the back of a closet.

If we're not careful, our digital images will be just as forgotten in a folder somewhere on the computer hard drive.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Digital photo albums have made organizing, editing, archiving and sharing photos far easier than the old process of writing names and dates on the
back and then squeezing them into tight-fitting album sleeves.

Most retail digital albums offer one click importing from a digital camera, scanner or computer file. Most have also incorporated the basic drag-and-drop technology to sort those photos into a specific order and allow users to set up slide shows. These days, you can even attach music files behind the photos to create a multimedia experience.

It sounds a lot more difficult to manage. But, in fact, creating a digital photo album and sharing it with loved ones is easier than ever -- in many different ways.

E-book Systems, a San Jose-based maker of photo album software, thinks people will share their photos and albums through CDs. Roxio, the company that makes the Easy CD Creator software that comes packaged with most CD recorders, agrees.

Iomega, maker of the popular Zip Disk, is hoping people will grasp on to their Lifeworks Photo Album. And Adobe Systems thinks people will turn to the Web for their sharing.

``A lot of the sharing that is happening out there these days really is focused on the Web,'' said Mark Dahm, a product manager at San Jose-based Adobe Systems.

Adobe is so sure of this that it's giving its product away for free, via a download from the Internet. The product, called Active Share, is actually a scaled down version of PhotoDeluxe, an editing and archiving program that allows photos to become part of greeting cards, fliers and presentations.

``What we learned in talking to our PhotoDeluxe customers was that they only really used 10 or 15 features of the product,'' he said. ``We extracted the 10 most common features, mostly the albuming features, and created Active Share.''

Those features include basic editing tools such as cropping and red-eye reduction.

You won't find those features on Iomega's Lifeworks Photo Album. But you will find probably one of the easiest sharing systems around.

The trick is having a Zip drive, which is usually an external drive, connected to your computer. On the downside, loading photos into an external system can sometimes be slow, depending on your equipment. But on the upside, Iomega incorporates a one-click disk copying feature that allows
you to copy everything -- the photo album program as well as the images -- onto a blank Zip.

When you give the copy to a friend, the photos pop up as a slide show, without the installation of any software.

That's the same idea behind Roxio's photo album, which is bundled as part of the Easy CD Creator 4 Deluxe, the version currently on store shelves. It's also the same thinking over at E-Book Systems, which makes Flip Album and the accompanying CD Maker software.

Roxio's software looks much like the others -- a series of thumbnail photos logged into the computer hard drive and then organized into different computer albums. Once the photos are organized, burning a CD copy is as easy as putting a blank CD in the computer and clicking on record.

The same is true for E-Book, though it requires users to buy a separate piece of software to make CDs.

Both also incorporate the Plug-n-Play idea into their burned CD copies -- recipients don't have to buy the software to view the photos. They just put the CD in and away it goes.

But E-Book Systems offers a few things the others don't -- and it may land them the consumers who are after the true photo album experience.

``The whole basis is to replicate the book metaphor on a two-dimensional surface,'' said Michael McGaughy, a vice president at the San Jose company.

The software brings the three-dimensional look of a photo album to the computer monitor, complete with the look and sound of pages flipping and little Post-It note-like bookmarks being placed on the sides of that book, just like one might do with a real photo album.

The look is very realistic and offers the user the feel of flipping through a real photo album. Photos, which can be renamed and have captions added, are logged in both a table of contents and index in the front and back of the ``book.''

In addition, FlipAlbum allows advanced users to incorporate HTML, the Web-page design language, into their albums to create links between the index and the photos, photos in other albums and, of course, to actual Web pages.

Source : SiliconValley.com
Also published on 02/18/2001, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS