Product Reviews

MGI's PhotoSuite has long been a favourite amongst budget-conscious digital photographers, and it's widely bundled with digital cameras, scanners and other imaging devices. The previous version looked like it did everything you could possibly want it to, helping you organise, edit and present your images, so what can version 4 do to go one step further?

Well, it builds on its Internet connectivity (the program's actually built around a web browser) so that you can upload your pictures to the GatherRound (www.gatherround.com) website, for example, organising them into albums for viewing online.

It's not just pictures you can post to the Internet, though, but entire web pages too. Thanks to a collection of templates and new web page editing tools, PhotoSuite 4 doubles as a web authoring kit. You're not going to be able to build sophisticated multi-page sites, but it's easy to knock together striking, interactive pages in mere minutes.

Interactive? Oh yes. One of the new features in this release is the ability to create panoramas by stitching together a sequence of photos. You can get your panorama to join up into a 360-degree view, and add navigation controls so that users visiting your web page can zoom in and out and pan around the scene.

This is just one of the ways in which you can create exciting, dynamic pages. You can also incorporate sounds, animated text, animated GIFs and slideshows. The animated GIF feature is especially clever, as you can

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create animations from sequences of still images - many digital cameras, for example, have a high-speed 'burst' mode for capturing sequences of frames in quick succession.

Or, if you don't want to post your pictures on the web, you can e-mail them directly to other people from within PhotoSuite 4, which now includes support for web-based e-mail services like HotMail, as well as ordinary e-mail accounts via MAPI.

You can also create Photo Tapestries - large images made up of hundreds, even thousands, of smaller thumbnails - while if all you want to do is print out your snapshots, the program's printing options include live previews and numerous options for printing several pictures on the same sheet.

This program covers an awful lot of ground, and it's enough to give any interface designer a headache. MGI's solution is to display a series of buttons across the top of the window to simulate your typical 'workflow' - 'Get', 'Prepare', 'Compose', 'Organize', 'Share', 'Print' and 'Browse'. Click on any one of these buttons, and the Activity panel running down the left-hand side of the window lists the tasks you can carry out.

It's all pitched at beginners, and built around on-screen instructions and step-by-step guides. And this is where PhotoSuite 4 is - inevitably - less suitable for more experienced users. Jobs are separated into clearly-defined sections and procedures, but that's not always how you want to work. If you're composing a collage, for example, and you need to edit objects individually, you have to do this in the Prepare section before returning to the collage to carry on. It's quite easy to lose track of what you're doing and what's happened to the picture you were just working on. In this respect, a nuts-and-bolts image-editor like PhotoShop LE is, paradoxically, a lot simpler to work with.

PhotoSuite 4 is a hugely polished, versatile, user-friendly program. And its new web authoring tools are really very impressive indeed - especially at this price. But while the learning curve might be shallow, it's a long one.