Product Reviews

Photo Explorer 8 is designed to help you organise your digital photo collection, with a range of utilities to import, sort, edit and display your photos.

Importing images is simple: if you have a digital camera that shows up as removable storage in Windows, the software will launch whenever you plug it into your PC. Downloaded pictures are displayed as thumbnails in the main Photo Explorer window, from where you can open them as a larger preview or at full size. A file browser lets you sort through

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folders of images, and you can create a set of Favourite folders for easy access. These organising facilities aren't very powerful - there's no way to associate keywords with images, for example - but they are simple to use.

Photo Explorer provides several tools for photo editing, including cropping, colour adjustment and special effects. These work well, but the preview window is annoyingly small. The red-eye removal also makes it hard to give corrected photos a natural look.

The tools for sharing pictures, however, are excellent. You can make slideshows with transitions and music and save them as a set of web pages or burn them as a Video CD or a CD-ROM for showing on a PC. You can also use one of your slideshows as a screensaver, or even print out calendars using your photos as illustrations. Pictures can be printed in a number of formats.

Photo Explorer 8 is simple software that does its job well. If you need to manage thousands of photos using keywords or perform complex editing then look elsewhere, but this is a good choice for anyone new to digital photography.