Software Review of:
Gallery 1.300,000 
Version 3 

Of course, a very helpful book, typical of Corel-published graphics books, full of four-color images is included with the program to thumb through — looking for just that right graphic to use for your project. Don’t have time to look through the book? Use Gallery’s search engine to help you save time. Open Gallery and you are presented with a window for typing in the subject of your search. In this instance, I chose Zebra to look for a potential image to use on the June cover. I narrowed the image search to only photos although I had the choice of Clipart or All Categories which would have included photos with clipart. Hitting return resulted in 40 “hits” of zebra photos. The file name for each image matching my search for zebra was displayed with the disc number preceding the file name. Since it looked like most of the zebra photos resided on Disc #6, I selected CD #6 and suddenly thumbnail images of zebras started filling the monitor screen.

Browsing the thumbnails showed several good candidate cover images. Double clicking on the thumbnail automatically opened Corel PhotoHouse (a separate program that is not included with Gallery) with the image in place to be cropped, altered or otherwise enhanced. Another technique I used was to click on a thumbnail image, open PhotoPaint, and drag the Gallery image into Photoshop in order to work on it.

Testing Gallery further, I did an image search of “Personal Digital Assistants” and got two clipart hits (Figure 3).

After thumbing through the pages of the Gallery images book, I found several images that would work as “filler” to place at the end of an article to fill out the space to the bottom of the page. This time I used the specific image feature of the Gallery search engine. Typing in a chosen image filename in the search engine window brought up the icon showing the disc number to put into the CD tray. Within a few seconds, the thumbnail of the image I had selected appeared in the Gallery window.

The Browse feature allows you to find items by looking in the category folders on the Corel Gallery CD-ROMs. This is a useful way to find items when you know where they are stored or when you want to view all the thumbnails in a category. To access items using the Browse page simply click the Browse tab, double-click the drive in which the item is stored and double-click the folder in which the item is stored. You can switch to the Browse page from another page by pressing ALT + B.

In the Favorites page, you can save images that you plan to use again. The Favorites page lets you keep track of all the items that you may want to use again, and allows you to access these items quickly. You do this by adding images you like to Favorites folders.

Speaking of favorites, I noted many, many, many new clipart and photo images in this latest version of Gallery but some old favorites were no longer in the book. Luckily I had saved some frequently used images on my hard drive. In other words, many of the images in Gallery are new.

Just who in their right mind needs 1,300,000 photos and clipart images? If you publish a newsletter for a church, civic group, garden club or similar organization, you can never have enough clipart. If you design Web pages, you will have enough buttons, backgrounds, dividers and labels to last a lifetime of Web page design. If you are a parent or grandparent who likes to surprise the kids with funny, silly or serious cards, posters and other printed stuff, this is a software package you should love.

As editor of PC Alamode magazine, I open Gallery 1,300,000 several times each month to look for an image to fit something that needs illustrating inside the issue. As the saying goes, try it; you’re sure to like it.

Corel Gallery 1,300,000 V.3.0, priced at $49.00 on Corel’s Website .. 

Corel Corporation
1600 Carling Ave.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1Z 8R7.