Photo Collage Maker

If you're looking for an easy-to-use digital scrapbook, Photo Collage Maker may be for you. You can use it to create attractive photo collages for your PC, e-mail, or Web site, too, and print out your creations as actual scrapbooks with ease. It comes with a wide range of backgrounds, clip art, borders, and effects that make it easy to put images of different sizes and even formats together.

Its clean, attractive interface keeps things simple. Simplicity is the program's biggest advantage, since most new PCs already come with at least one image-editing tool, often a "lite" version of a powerful program like Photoshop. But it can take longer to learn to use such extensive and complex tools than it does to actually complete a project with Photo Collage Maker. It collects all the features, frames, borders, enhancements, and effects you need in one place, without overwhelming you with options and settings.

Using Photo Collage Maker is easy: you simply choose your background, colors, clip art, and other aspects of composition, browse to your image files, and add your selections. We'd like to see the ability to add multiple files at once, since it can be awkward to scroll back through the folder. Some of the effects are a bit difficult to use; for instance, the perspective tool has a button to apply the effect but not one to undo it. Photo Collage Maker downloads as a ZIP file; the 30-use trial version lacks the ability to print collages and download new clip art.