Software
Review of: |
| "You
sigh, the song begins, you speak and I hear violins. . .it's magic!" Yes,
I consider FlipAlbum magical because with it you can create a digital photo
album almost instantly. With a click of your mouse you automatically create
an album with thumbnail pages, table of contents, index and photos that
are neatly laid onto album pages.
FlipAlbum is a painless way to organize your photos. You can create as many folders or albums as you desire. You are limited only by the capacity of your hard drive. After that, there are zip discs and other storage methods. I've got 12 gigabytes of hard drive, so it might take a while to fill it up. Problem: I have thousands of 35mm slides that I paint my watercolors from. They reside in carousel trays, archival slide pages in notebooks, yellow cardboard boxes that processed slides come in and lately little green and white boxes. There are loose slides in clean ash trays (I don't smoke) and plastic boxes that strawberries come in and a few slides on the floor under furniture. You can imagine what I have to go through if I'm looking for a particular slide? I have several software programs that promised a panacea for my slide dilemma. My general impression is that the designers of these programs, with altruism in mind, made the process more complicated than necessary and cumbersome for my pea pickin' brain. The other programs are good (till more promising programs come along), but they seem to dictate what they will allow you to do, not what would be convenient to the user. Solution: After I did the thing with the CD and followed instructions, it was when I clicked Open, heard the sound of a book opening, and had this book jump onto my screen that somehow I felt that I had witnessed something special. I had a premonition that FlipAlbum might be the answer for organizing my slides. FlipAlbum says, here's a book. Do with it whatever you want to do. Here are the tools on your Menu and Tool bars. And we have made things as automatic as possible to allow you the intuitive and creative freedom you require. On the other hand, if you realize that the roll of film in your camera has both winter and summer pictures on it, you can save the $49.00 that FlipAlbum retails for. But, if you tend to have diarrhoea of the camera as I do, please continue
reading. In order to utilize FlipAlbum, you'll need to have:
After installation, to find FlipAlbum, click on Start, then Programs and there it is. When you click on FlipAlbum 3.0, suddenly, at the top of the screen is a Menu bar and a Toolbar. Note that some icons represent left and right pages. Icons on your Toolbar are:
Need another album so you can better organize your photos? Click New, title the new album and go through the above procedure again, ad infinitum. FlipAlbum will automatically update whatever you do, such as add a new file or remove stuff from a directory. FlipAlbum views each file directory as an "album" folder. You do not have to Asave@ albums. Exit (drop from File) FlipAlbum when you're finished and the next time you run it, it will open the last album opened (default option). FlipAlbum supports TWAIN interface, so you can download picture files from scanners, digital cameras, video capture cards or any other TWAIN compatible devices. Click the File menu and click Get Image, Select Source (digital camera, for instance), select Acquire to download. If it works, you're on the wight TWACK. If you don't have a scanner or digital camera, but you still wanna play, the Internet is a huge source of both free and copyrighted images. I suggest avoiding the copyrighted stuff as there is so much of the other around. Save the images in a download directory, create an album by selecting and opening the download directory. To turn the pages of your album, click your cursor on the page you want to flip and it does. It's nice to hear the sound of the page turning. If you don't have speakers, well. . .the speed of turning the page can be adjusted using the Options menu. If the sound of music will help you navigate your album, click on the Music icon and voila!, there's innocuous music playing. If you prefer Beethoven, get a record or CD player. Thumbnail Overview are pages of miniature images from your file. Click your cursor on a Thumbnail and the photo enlarges to fill your screen. Click again and you are back to Overview. Click on Auto Flip and pages of your album flip with one image on each page. Click again and it stops. While you have a photo on the screen, click the Edit icon on the selected page and a Toolbar appears with 33 icons. Descriptions of these functions are on page 16 of the User's Guide. The item that intrigues me is under Colors of the Menu bar. It is the half-tone feature, a first as far as I know. You can convert any photo into a half-tone and with a choice of two intensities. You can see it doesn't take much to keep me happy. What I have described about FlipAlbum is only a hint of what is available. I highly recommend FlipAlbum as a program designed with me and my needs in mind before I knew what I needed. Have you ever heard, "I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it?" FlipAlbum is the product of
444 Castro Street, Suite 412 Mountain View, CA 94041.
Kuo Yen Ng is a USAA retiree who enjoys the frustrations of computerism when he isn't enjoying putting spots on paper otherwise know as watercolor. He is president and CEO of MAA (Muthas Against Acronyms). |