Using a digital camera saves money on film and photo development, and you can delete the pictures that you don't like, but you also end up with reams of image files on your computer. For this, Micro Research's 3D-Album provides a viable means to organize photos on a computer into virtual PC-based photo albums. The program is simple to use and the end results are attractive and impressive.

To start, 3D-Album offers simple tools for viewing and organizing photo images that are stored on your computer. You simply drag and drop image thumbnails to change the presentation order, and then select a style for the 3D album. The program then builds a colorful and visually impressive slide-show. It doesn't get any easier than this.

software - 3-D Album

3D-Album provides over 70 3D styles. Some are fairly straight-forward-walking down hallways with pictures, floating balloons, scrolling frames and more. And some are downright distracting with spinning boxes and such.

Each presentation style has a number of settings that you may adjust that includes the animation speed; photo size; background color, material, and texture; and headline text. In addition to the 23 built-in styles, Micro Research offers more styles that may be downloaded for free from its website. An Album Mixer feature lets you create a composite 3D-Album presentation with multiple presentation styles and transitions.

The program covers the multimedia bases. You may insert your own personal text and voice narrations for each photo as well as select background sounds and music by linking MP3, WMA, WAVE, or MIDI files. 3D-Album creates stand-alone desktop programs, screensavers, HTML pages, ZIP files, and self-expandable EXE files. The EXE files are useful for sharing albums with others on CD.

On the other hand, many users will want to do is create CDs of their albums that may be viewed through a DVD player on the family television set. To do this, you have to purchase Micro Research's video capture software that converts 3D-Album presentations into VCD or DVD format to playback on a DVD player.

If you already own Microsoft PowerPoint, you may be unimpressed with 3-D Album. PowerPoint lacks 3-D Album's flashy virtual albums and ease of use, and it costs a lot more (you have to purchase it as part of Microsoft's Office Suite). But if you've been wanting to organize your digital photos into virtual albums and don't already use Microsoft PowerPoint, 3D-Album is definitely worth a look.

9/22/2003 - Daytrum Editorial Staff