Labs

Like Photo Explorer, Photo Album aims to be a one-stop shop for a range of photographic needs but it doesn't provide the same degree of sophistication as dedicated image editors.

The first time you run Photo Album it offers to find every photograph (that is, every bitmapped image) on your hard disk. When you start browsing photos you can choose 'all photographs' as an alternative to browsing individual folders. You can also add titles and descriptions to your photographs. The embedded data is accessible to any application that supports metadata.

In addition to photo-management facilities, Photo Album also offers basic editing features, plus some less common ones such as a panorama tool and a 'thinify' feature to make people look slimmer. There are also photo printing and sharing, slideshow and automatic batch renaming features.

The software also has some more unusual features. There's a selection of tools to help you create greetings cards, calendars, CD labels and the like, and there's also a photo backup facility, which is essential in making sure you don't lose all your photographs in the event of a disk failure or other mishap.