Product Reviews

If your hard disk is stuffed full of digital photos, you're probably wishing there was an instant way to find those you want without having to trawl through endless folders, or having to remember when the pictures were taken. Windows Vista lets you tag each photo with keywords, but few people have the time or inclination to tag thousands of images.

Photology doesn't use tags, but analyses your photos and automatically indexes them. This allows you to instantly filter them by attributes that you wouldn't normally expect. For example, if you're looking for a photo of a sunflower, simply click the Color filter and choose the appropriate shade of yellow. Alternatively, use the 'content' button to search

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for photos containing flowers.

There are plenty of other ways to search, too. Choose from over- or underexposed photos, blurry or sharp photos, landscape or portrait orientation, time of day, and more. It's a quirky system, but it works well because you can combine filters to narrow down the results.

If you're after that Miami beach snap and you can remember which year you went, you can search by selecting the year, then photos with beach content, and even pick the colour of someone's Speedos. Chances are you'll find the exact photo on the first or second screen of results.

Thanks to indexing, searching is almost instant, and you'll usually find a match in under 30 seconds. Performance will depend on your PC's specification, but Photology fully supports multicore processors.

In addition to searching, Photology provides basic tools such as brightness, contrast and cropping for editing photos non-destructively. You can upload images directly to a Flickr account, as well as emailing or printing them. A share-to-web button uploads your images to a temporary location, and you can then simply send friends the URL so they can download them.

It would be nice to have support for more than JPEG, TIFF and PNG image formats. Still, at £20, Photology is good value.