PhotoAlb for Windows

This tool for creating photo albums suffers from several functionality problems that keep it from being a better option. PhotoAlb's nonresizable launch window displays a few icons on the left and a list of your albums on the right, including the sample albums the developers have added to help get you started.

Adding pictures to an album is a relatively simple affair, although we were disappointed to find there's no easy way to switch album templates. The application does provide a tool for tweaking the existing design to your liking, but we couldn't get it to work. PhotoAlb gives you basic image-editing utensils for rotating, removing red-eye from, and cropping shots, along with several standard-issue effects and filters. However, when using this app's rather convoluted system for applying effects, we never managed to successfully save our changes to a photo.

Like many competing programs, PhotoAlb can create slide shows with music, but the help box that told us how to associate tunes with certain slides directed us to a nonexistent menu item. All told, this app needs quite a bit of work before we can be more enthusiastic about it.