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Digital camera owners often find themselves overwhelmed by hundreds or even thousands of pictures stored on their PCs. I looked at three new software packages that try to make importing, editing, and organizing images into a digital photo collection as painless as possible. ACD Systems' ACDSee 5 and Adobe Systems' Adobe Photoshop Album, both $50, seem appropriate for slightly more experienced digital enthusiasts, whereas Lifescape Solutions' $30 Picasa 1.5 is aimed at family photographers.

While overall I found Adobe Photoshop Album to be the best balance of form and function, all three let you easily e-mail and print photos, as well as create slide shows. Image properties, such as file size, date, and exposure data, are displayed on command. To help you get organized, the programs use similar methods of tagging your pictures with keywords such as "vacation," "friends," and "family." You may also customize tags to create categories for more-specific sorting. A handy time-line feature lets you view images in chronological order.

Start Managing

Picasa 1.5 has a clean, uncluttered interface and is the easiest to navigate of the three. The trade-off is that the program sacrifices some scope: Its image editing capabilities are limited, and its slide show is not as customizable as those in the other two album-manager programs. However, this shipping software is wonderfully efficient at finding sources of images (including card readers). Once Picasa gathers the images, the program displays them in a series of thumbnails arranged by folder. All 200 of the images on my hard drive were easily moved, tagged, and selected. The software also lets you perform simple edits, such as brightness/contrast adjustment, rotation, and red-eye reduction. I prefer to do edits in Photoshop, but newbies will likely find that Picasa's editing options are adequate.

ACDSee 5's interface is dense and often difficult to navigate; many small buttons, icons, and windowpanes compete for attention (though you can customize windows and toolbars). But it has great user control; for example, you can add a caption to each picture, perform fairly sophisticated image edits, and create tailored slide shows. My shipping program also let me add keywords and descriptions to my pictures, allowing for more-precise searches. ACDSee will automatically search your computer's hard drive for images, but to acquire photos from another source you'll need to browse your system. This program's options and complex interface caused me to consult the manual more frequently than I did with the other programs.

Uncomplicated

Adobe Photoshop Album offers many of the features that ACDSee does but is easier to use. On launch, my preproduction copy opened a simple dialog box asking what I wanted to do, from acquiring new images to opening, editing, and sharing photos already stored on my computer. Like ACDSee, Photoshop Album allows you to edit and organize images with fairly comprehensive tools. It also has a customizable slide-show function and an elegant interface.

SUMMARY

ACD Systems ACDSee 5 Includes solid features, but its competitors are easier to use. List: $50

SUMMARY

Adobe Systems Adobe Photoshop Album Best balance of function and form for intermediate/advanced users. List: $50

SUMMARY

Lifescape Solutions Picasa 1.5 Extremely simple to use; best of the three programs for novices. List: $30