Photos Albums 1,2,3

If you want to make a surprise photo album and send it to your friends, then Photo Album Creator is the tool that can help you. It will allow you to create an all-customized album for you and your friends to enjoy.

Most of us like to take photos when going on vacation, at birthday parties or important moments of our lives. Whether you are a passionate photographer that takes hundreds of photos or just an amateur that will settle for a few, you might be interested in creating digital albums with your best creations. This is where Photo Album Creator comes in play. It's a small, very easy to use app that will help you design and create wonderful photo albums for you to share with your loved ones.

This software comes free of charge, so you can use it for as long as it satisfies you needs. You must have .NET Framework 2.0 installed in order to use it.

The first step is, of course, selecting the images that will be displayed in the album. You add them with the help of the Add Images button. Unfortunately, the Drag and Drop function is not supported.

I was pleased to notice that this program supports a large area of image formats, from the most common (JPEG, BMP, GIF) to the not so popular WMF or EMF. This surely is a plus brought to the table.

In order to select multiple images you must use the Selecting Mode that can be activated by pressing the designated button. The Sorting Mode will enable you to determine the order for your photos.

Next, you can add comments to each image you've added to your album. You are not limited to a number of characters, so feel free to write anything about the image in question. To save your comment, don't forget to press the Post button.

The third step in the wizard will allow you to add an album welcome text. This will help you create a more professional looking photo album, not just a dull image list. You can also edit an album ending text, so that your album would be perfect.

Unlike the photo comments, these texts can be customized in a special window. You can change the used font, font color or text alignment (left, center or right). Basically, you can use any font installed on your system.

Last, but certainly not least, you can select for a music file to be played during the slideshow. If you create the album for somebody and want to induce a certain mood (a weeding photo album for instance) this option will surely help.

You can also add a video file in this field. The developer, however, does not recommend it because the album size will get bigger. Please note that only the audio part of the video will be played. All Windows Media Player supported file types can be used, because the media file will be played using the Microsoft Windows Media Player control.

Once you've finished doing these adjustments you can create your album. The result will be an exe file that can be ran with just a double-click. You can navigate through it using the mouse or opt for a slideshow. It's true that you can't adjust the timing for this slideshow, but the result is quite satisfactory.

While viewing the photos, you can easily enable and disable photo comments. So, if you are only interested in the images, you can just check them out without what you may consider to be unnecessary text.

This album also stands out because it allows the user to print a certain image that interests him or to copy it to their computer. You can adjust the music volume through a slider without altering the sound settings of the computer.

One last adjustment you can make is viewing the image at its actual size or resizing it to fit the album window. It's a useful feature, because it helps you get the best view for your photos.

I think it's fair to say that this tool offers a high level of customization for your albums. It's true that it "eats up" a fair amount of resources: 52Mb RAM in stand-by and, while creating an album, it can go up to 130 MB RAM. It's not an appropriate tool for a computer with an old configuration.

Basically, this application will enable you to create and send digital photo albums to your friends. You can, of course, just create them for your personal use. Also, because your albums are separate files, you can back them up to make sure that you won't lose them in case your computer crashes.

To sum up, given the fact that it's very easy to use and it allows a high level of customization, Photo Album Creator is a tool worthy of having in your software arsenal. Not to mention it will do all that without taking a penny out of your pocket.

The Good

The Bad

The Truth