Flexible Album Studio

Pictures quickly became an important resource around the web, serving for more tasks than just entertainment. There’s no need for complicated tools to bundle your collection in a neat album, and using applications like Flexible Album Studio doesn’t even require you to have any kind of programming skills.

To start off, you need to add some pictures, and this can either be done by importing multiple pictures at a time, or loading the content of an entire folder at once. File support is impressive, letting you add formats like TIF, GIF, JPG, PCX, BMP, ICO, CUR, PNG, DCM, WMF, EMF, TGA, PXM, WBMP, JP2, J2K, CRW, PSD, and a few more.

The current project can be saved to file, in case you later on want to adjust more settings. Related picture options aren’t abundant, but you can take images one by one in order to provide a custom name, keywords, and category. It’s a good idea to fill in all tags, at least if you later on want to search according to these values.

Sadly, there’s no built-in editor, not even a simple color correction tool, so you need to make sure all pictures are ready when loading them. What you can do is apply basic rotation, which also affects the original file, or move to a different spot in the gallery. This makes arrangement pretty difficult, especially because there’s no way to drag them in the right order directly from the preview list.

You might end up scratching your head for a while when done loading, and managing pictures. Starting the build process provides feedback on progress, but there’s no prompt to tell you it’s done, or the chance to have the destination folder opened, which is different from the picture collection source.

For things to go out right, you need to access the project settings panel, which takes you through a few steps that clarify the whole situation. For instance, there are a few style option for a bit more diversity, even though it can’t be customized. Encoding, title, and name are available for edit, among others.

Here is where you also get to specify the destination path, as well as the number of rows and columns for the index. Pictures can be saved with the original size specifications, and thumbnails enabled for a simple preview.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Flexible Album Studio is a straightforward tool with which to build a simple web album out of multiple pictures. File support adds a lot to practicality, and even though customization options are pretty shallow, it’s worth your while in the end.