15-Minute Reviews :: Wondershare Photo Story v2.5.5 (Quick)
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is Wondershare Photo Story version 2.5.5 by Wondershare Software – An application offering a way to assemble your photos into a video presentation quickly and easily.
I have previously reviewed Photo Story Platinum version 2.1.0 – This will be a quick review based off of this title since there hasn’t been much changed since 2.1.0.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“Wondershare Photo Story is an innovative also easy-to-use photo album software that brings your digital photos to life. You can easily create photo album by using a variety of stylish preset templates.
Simply add your photos, choose the templates, add some decorations, intro/end cast movie, then share your photo story with your family and friends.”
Expansion
As I start reviewing the author’s site here, Wondershare Photo Story is essentially the Lite version of Photo Story Platinum. The main difference is this title lacks the video file creation (Such as AVI, mp4, 3gp, DVD and so forth) whereas platinum has these features. I can’t tell much other difference from this title from the last either. It looks like there has been more templates added since the previous version as well, which is even more of a bonus than previous. Of course, there is even more templates available online at their resource center so that you can expand your building even further, which is great. I can’t find an actual changelog on the website to see what has truly changed since 2.1.0 however, so I’m not too sure what has changed (Their forums seem to be down from the Giveaway traffic too).
When I made it down to the Publish page, it seems that my concerns from the original review have been addressed. The website filenames can be set by yourself now, which is a plus for sure, rather than having to go in and edit the HTML to change the name; While I do wish that the application would have hyphened the names so that you didn’t have to worry about that when uploading, it isn’t that difficult as it is. As well, As I performed a few slideshow creations, I did not experience the issues with the SWF files outputted and the preloader worked fine this time as well too. For the most part, this title has improved just slightly. Now, we could only hope for secure FTP support to make this an all-in-one package.
Unfortunately it seems that the application has not been adjusted for the delete button on the main menu to avoid accidental clicks, it is something only minor we have to deal with. I just wish I could find the changelog to see just what has changed besides bug fixes.
Final Verdict
All-in-all, this is essentially the same great quality as Photo Story Platinum, minus the video output functionality. While free, if you are planning on adding some life to your photos for online presentation and either posting online, emailling or other similar situations, I would highly recommend picking up this title; It offers a lot of functionality in a small package, and can be great for anyone with a desire to add some flair. As for paying $39.95 for this title, I would much rather pay an extra $10 to get the video and DVD output functionality and steer clear of the lite version. It’s not that this version is bad, it’s just for an extra $10, you might as well get the DVD authoring functionality and video output as well.
Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, September 13, 2007
