A 30-day Evaluation copy is available on their web
site
Price: $139.95 US dollars.
Reviewed by Don Hughes
Test System Intel P4, 512MB RAM, Windows XP
professional,
ATI Radon 7500 video. 60 GB hard drive.
FlipAlbum’s minimum system requirements:
Windows 95/98/NT4.0/2000/ME/XP
PC Compatible, Pentium II 300 MHz or better
64 MB RAM or more
80 MB free hard drive space
CDRW drive & CD burner software.
16-bit colour display adapter or better
800 X 600 pixels screen area
E-Book’s version 5 of FlipAlbum is
available in three variations: Standard, Suite
and Professional. The Standard version is limited to users wishing to make
photographs available online. If your needs are to make and burn
FlipAlbum’s
CDR disks, there are two choices Suite or Professional. For the majority
of users
E-Books Flip Album 5 suite is more than adequate and is about half the
cost of
Flip Album Pro.
Flip Album software does exactly what the name
implies, by creating photo
albums a user can flip through manually or have
the program auto-flip the pages.
Forget bringing out the screen and slide
projector, FlipAlbum has a built in side
show feature. FlipAlbum makes
things easier; to import any saved digitalized
photographs from a camera,
scanner or the Internet from a folder on the hard
drive. Then with a few
keystrokes and mouse clicks, a user can create a
photograph album that
anyone with a computer or DVD player can flip
through pages by the click
of a mouse or remote control buttons.
After the album is created, and saved to the hard
drive, it is a simple matter
to burn the images onto a blank CDR disk. The
user clicks on the CD Maker
Icon from FlipAlbum’s top menu, and just
follows the well-documented screen
instructions. Once the CD burn process
has completed the user is ready to
create a self-booting photo album CD.
The FlipAlbum does not contain a CD burner utility;
however, during the
process FlipAlbum creates a directory called
AlbumCD—see photo. After
creating an Album for burning, you can preview
the album prior to loading
your favorite CDRW burning software—This is a
step I highly recommend.
Own a digital camera long enough and one acquires
hundreds of photographs
sitting on your computer hard drive. The digital
camera user soon has a
problem of how to share the special images or
memories with family, friends
or simply archive. Flip Album Professional
can store multiple albums on a
single self-booting CD, complete with
sounds in MP3, WAV, or MID formats.
The FlipAlbum software arrived on a single CD DISK,
and with a small easy to
hold, seventy-two page users’ guide, measuring
four and a half inch wide, by
seven-inches high. Installation was quick
and easy. One problem I soon
encountered was with the supplied manual. I
reached the age where one
needs and must use reading glass, and I found
the small page size and
light-colored text extremely difficult to read.
It did not take me long before I downloaded a copy of
the manual from the
documentation area E-Books web site. Once the
downloaded completed
I printed out the entire PDF manual (note: be sure to
set the printout for
full-page coverage) to our laser printer making the
manual easier to read.
During installation, FlipAlbum installs a program
icon on the desktop, and
a double click of a mouse loads FlipAlbum. Once
the program is on the
screen, users can crate a new blank book and insert
the objects, or open
a file folder containing the objects (photos). Once
the album is created,
end users can add music, or add a voice narration as
the pages flip.
The Flip Albums flip book covers; pages are
customizable with many colorful
themes, bindings and backgrounds. User can
also purchase more themes,
backgrounds from Flip Albums web site.
FlipAlbum is a very user customizable,
only limited by the end user’s
imagination.
Once the album is completed and has all
the necessary text, sounds or
photographs added, a single click on the
Burn CD button on the menu creates
a directory and names the directory
"AlbumCD."
At
first, the "Burn CD"
command in FlipAlbum was puzzling,
as it did not call
up the CD-RW burning
software. The command creates a
directory, and then
copies all the
necessary files needed to make the
self-booting CD Album.
The next step is to open your CD-RW
burner software
and following FlipAlbum’s
instructions drag and drop the files to a
CDR
disk. The entire process is simple
a three step program 1. Create an
album.
2. Start the Burn CD process, and files are
copied to a directory
on your hard drive.
3. Load your CD Burner software, drag,
drop and burn a
CDR disk.
FlipAlbum program is very user friendly,
and guides
the user through the process
of making a single or multiple Albums on
a
self-booting CDR disk.
If you wish to create multiple Albums per CD, the
first step is to create save
each photograph directory as a single album.
Multiple albums are created in
the Burn CD process menu asks if this is a
single or multiple albums, and a
click of the mouse makes the choice.
The Multiple Albums make use of a feature named
"Bookshelf" which appears
on screen with the program prompting for the
number of Albums per shelf and
the number of shelves. In the bookshelf set
up a user, customize the look and
colour of the bookshelf and books. If
you had nine albums you wanted to store
on a bookshelf, the settings could
be three by three or three albums across
and three shelves down.
Once the bookshelf dimensions are set,
each single album is imported and
stored in the AlbumCD directory. As soon
as the process of making a multiple
album is, completed users can preview
the bookcase and test it, before
proceeding to burn a CDR disk. As
previous, the user loads his or her CD-ROM
burning software then drags and
drops the multiple files onto a CDR disk.
After the burning process has completed,
any user will be proud of the results
be it a single or multi self-booting CD, complete with a Flipbook viewer.
The
self-booting CDR disk and viewer makes it easy to view or print
photographs
for even a computer novice. During testing, we have made several flip
album
CDs for family, friends, and all have been very impressed with the ease of
use
to display or print the photographs from the album.
The multiple album features give a user a simple way
to display and retrieve
display months or years worth of photographs, such
as Weddings, birthdays,
school graduations, special events, anniversaries,
new baby first steps.
Once created theses albums CDs can be copied and
given to family and
friends, just as you would share reprints of
photographs. The only
requirement is they must have a computer or a DVD
Player.
FlipAlbum has the ability to convert photographs into
MPEG format,
for use on a DVD player. However, the converting process is
intensive
and the faster the computer the better. Even on our Pentium IV,
the
conversation took about a minute per photograph or nearly six hours
to
convert just over four hundred photographs.
FlipAlbum stores the converted MPEG files, in a
directory called AlbumVCD,
and once the process is done you can make
multiple copies from the same
directory or copy the CD. Note your CD
burning software must be cable of
making a video CD. In spite of the slow
conversation process, I was pleased
with the results when we tested the
newly created video disk in our DVD player.
During a few months of testing FlipAlbum completed
everything we could
throw at the program without any major blunders. If we
did run into a problem,
it was usually user created and not a program
fault. The only two things I could
find fault with FlipAlbum were the slow
DVD format conversation speed and
the small print in their manual.
The power and flexible of the program and its ability
to make CDR disk that
can be locked (prevent photos from being copied or
printed), and the
program given an expiry date will make FlipAlbum a
valuable tool for
photographers or companies wanting to create catalogs or
product demos.
Anyone who has a digital camera, or a scanner, plus slides
or photographs
can now share and display photographs in a handy easy to
use format
self-booting CD format. Visit FlipAlbum’s web site and buy or
download
a trial copy of FlipAlbum.
Price $39.95 (US)
Reviewed by Don Hughes.
Photolightning is quick, fast and extremely easy to use
for editing and
correcting digital photographs. On the web site,
Photolightning claims the
program is "as easy as 1, 2, 3. At last, digital
camera users can have their
very own personal photo center right at their
fingertips. Photolightning
removes the complexity involved with processing
digital photos, allowing
even beginners to print, e-mail and share photos
within minutes. Following
an easy three-step process, digital camera users
can process a typical set
of 24 photos in five minutes or less.
Photolightning is the first product to
finally bridge the gap between
taking digital photos and making prints from
them."
The program is intended to work hand in hand with
FlipAlbum. During testing,
I found Photolightning a very useful tool when
working with digital photographs.
The top menu is designed with the novice
or new graphics user in mind.
Using the tool bar you can crop, rotate,
remove redeye, adjust the backlighting,
colour, sharpen the photo, and fix
a photograph that is out of focus.
However, in spite of the simplified
editing power of the program there are
limits one can do if the photograph
is really out of focus or too dark.
The first thing that struck me about Photolightning was
the ease of use for
the end user. Any novice will be able to correct minor
errors in photographs
like a pro. Just under the top menu are three extra
buttons
numbered: .1 Preview, 2. Label, 3. Print, email, share. Menu icons
allow the
user to Delete Undo, Rotate, Zoon In, Zoom Out, Redeye, Crop,
and Adjust
photo. No complex menus, no learning curve, just download,
install and
start editing.
During our testing Photolightning was a real performer,
easy to learn and
use. We cropped, edited, fixed, many photographs and in
each case,
Photolightning worked without a single glitch. If your looking
for a super,
easy to use program for editing your digital photographs, go
to the
Photolightning web site and download a demo copy.
