News :: 15MR: Zoner Photo Studio Xpress v9.0b4

Hello all! Today’s 15-Minute Review is Zoner Photo Studio Xpress by ZONER Inc.—A photo organizer and minor image manipulator

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Zoner Photo Studio 9 is the new way to manage your photos. Have you ever bought photo software and found it’s missing something? With Zoner Photo Studio 9, this will never happen. With Zoner Photo Studio 9 Professional you get an all-in-one photos program for every step from acquiring photos to readying them to organizing them to sharing them.

New in Zoner Photo Studio 9: GPS support, 16-bit per color channel, vertical panoramas, DVD slideshow with MPEG2, easy batch filter for editing and much more…”

Quick Pros

• Thumbnail previews are quick
• Built-in importing including TWAIN support
• Import GPS data and attach to photos (Google maps too)
• Albums are a separate folder structure using links (Pro and Con)

Quick Cons

• No tagging functionality
• No web gallery or uploading support
• Albums are a separate folder structure using links (Pro and Con)
• 16-bits/channel ONLY for Professional version ( See chart here )
• DVD slideshow maker ONLY for Professional version ( See chart here )
• Batch filtering ONLY for Professional version ( See chart here )

Expansion

When I saw the feature set posted on Giveaway of the Day I was excited to see a few features I’d like. Batch filtering being the major one. However, when I got into the application, registered it up and kept it at Xpress (I do not do ‘demos’ for reviews, for those of you who are wondering why I didn’t do the ‘trial’ of Professional,) I could not find the batching feature. Figuring I had overlooked it, I passed it up for now, continuing to look around. As I played more with the application, I realized I couldn’t find the DVD slideshow either. Baffled at this, I headed over to The author’s feature comparison and I became quickly disappointed. All the features announced on Giveaway of the Day’s Website happened to be for the Professional version ONLY. The version we were offered was not the Professional, nor Home version, but the Xpress version (The lowest version.)

Looking past this confusion from how Giveaway of the Day was stating features, I proceeded to continue my review. All-in-all, if you are fond of organizing your photos by folders, this isn’t too bad of an application to do so with. If you prefer to sort your images totally virtually rather than using shortcuts, or moreso prefer a ‘tagging’ method, you will be disappointed. While this application is still a bit cluttered, it isn’t as bad as others I’ve used; Granted, this lack of ‘clutter’ comparatively has increased the number of clicks to perform tasks, by hiding these tasks in menus. It’s not too bad for most functions unless you’re looking to manipulate the ‘Information’ menu; It’s not greatly organized in my opinion.

The built-in features of this low-end version isn’t too bad for those looking to do basic tasks. Crop, rotate, resize & basic fixes and corrections are here, albiet to do your whole album would still be fairly tedious to enhance colors on each and every image one by one. One feature I did note is the GPS log importing; You can add GPS information to images for later use. While granted the import process would still require you to go through images one-by-one and GPS data you’ve logged, the help of the Google Maps can help this task significantly. Oh, why can’t we have lightweight GPS add-ons for digital cameras? To top it off, you don’t have to leave the application to bring in new photos; The ‘aquire’ menu provides for an assortment of importing functionality including TWAIN support.

Final Verdict

Besides Giveaway of the Day not documenting quite clearly enough what was ‘Professional’ functionality was and what was the functionality of ‘Xpress’, this application isn’t too bad. While Picasa comparatively very powerful to Xpress, there are some pluses to this application over Picasa, as mentioned above. It is decent find for free and can be tried side-by-side with Picasa to see which method of organization suits you best. The price of #14.95 isn’t too bad, but I feel for large collections, this application may still be a lightweight and not handle as well as others. If you want all of the Pro features, it may be in your best interest to pick up this copy and try it out, and then contact the author and see if you qualify for the $69.95 upgrade to Professional; Cheaper than the $84.95 for the full retail price.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, March 16, 2007