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Instead of cramming boxes full of family photos into closets, people now use their computers to store their pictures.
Yet finding a missing image on a hard drive can be just as frustrating as a family scavenger hunt through boxes looking for a particular photo.
To make it easier, software companies offer an array of photo organizing and management programs, virtual shoeboxes that can be filled with digital images and organized into albums or folders.
Many include at least basic editing tools to fix red eye, crop or make other adjustments. They also have fun features, from creating slideshows to making it easy to share photos by e-mail or on the Web.
These programs are aimed at newcomers to digital photography and do not include all the editing features of some of the top photo-editing programs for consumers, such as Photoshop Elements, Jasc's Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft's Picture It Digital Image Pro.
Here's a sampling:
Paint Shop Photo Album Jasc, Windows, $49: The successor to Jasc's excellent After Shot program tops this field. It's easy to use, includes a range of editing tools and makes it simple to share digital photos. In addition to a Quick Fix button for basic cleanup, Photo Album also has an Adjust Wizard to fiddle with color, exposure, vividness and sharpness. Its Help features also are strong. A free 30-day trial can be downloaded from its Web site (www.jasc.com)
Photoshop Album (Adobe, Windows, $49.99): Photoshop in the name doesn't mean it has all the features of its well-known higher-end cousins. In fact, Adobe says Album is complementary to Photoshop and Elements, not simply a lower-end version. It emphasizes organizing your digital photos, which it does well with a relatively easy system of placing category tags on the photos. It includes a timeline across the top of the screen that helps you look up photos by date. For more than basic editing, though, use Elements.
PhotoSuite 5 (Roxio, Windows, $49.99): Roxio tries hard to make PhotoSuite easy to use. It has a simple, clean look, with four main icons down the left (Transfer, Edit & Create, Print & Share, and View, Organize and Archive). Moving the mouse over any of the icons gives additional choices. It has a good tutorial and features the Photo Doctor, a one-click basic fix for photos. It may be too basic for anyone with even a little digital photo editing experience, and it was sluggish in our tests.
Picasa Lifescape Solutions, Windows, $29.99: Picasa excels as a photo organizer, finding images on the hard drive and displaying them in folders. But it doesn't match up with the others on editing tools or flexibility on functions such as the slideshow. It does have a free trial period from its Web site (www.picasa.net)
ACDSee 5.0 (ACD, Windows, $49.95): ACDSee has a cluttered look and a confusing array of icons. It's not intuitive and requires more of an effort to learn than the others in this group.
iPhoto 2 (Apple, Macintosh, free download): The initial release of Apple's iPhoto showed promise as a management tool for digital photos but never seemed to have all of the functionality needed. Version 2 fixes that, letting you organize, add keywords, color correct, print and backup digital photos. IPhoto 2 added much-needed but rudimentary photo tweaking tools, so you don't need Photoshop to do minor retouching, contrast and brightness adjustments and color correction. It also offers a variety of printing options, from one image to multiple images per page, and preset options such as greeting card, sampler and contact sheet. A neat feature: IPhoto alerts you if you try to print an image larger than its resolution allows, which keeps you from wasting ink and paper on pixelated prints.
- Times staff writer William Lampkin contributed to this report.