Digital Image Reviewer's Comments

Note: Microsoft has discontinued media software for the home user. A new line of professional products, Microsoft Expression, is now available. The media organizing software is priced at $299.

Freely arrange, change or exchange your favorite pics effortlessly—with Microsoft’s Digital Image, our “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winner.

This program can arrange your images in up to 16 categories and enables you to transfer images to your cell phone or PDA. It also has a function that can help you manage your workload by sorting images individually by what you want to do with them later.

Microsoft offers three Digital Image products, Standard, Suite and Plus. We downloaded their Standard version for this review.

Digital Image Screenshots. Click for more
       


Feature Set:  

When it comes to organizing your photos, Digital Image 2006 takes a back seat to no one. The Digital Image Library can group photos in an amazing 16 categories: Auto, Date Taken, Month Taken, Year Taken, Occasion, File Size, Image Size, File Type, Rating, Folder, Label, Flag, Camera, None, Ascending or Descending. You can even organize your video files and change the size and type of multiple files at once, batch processing. Photos can be viewed by folder, date or label.

Digital Image 2006 also allows you to rate your photos from one to five stars or you can flag them with different tags so that you can keep track of what you need to do with each individual photo in the future such as edit, save or send.

The standard version contains many photo editing and enhancing options including an Auto Fix feature as well as crop, color adjustments, red–eye removal, rotate, flip and resize. Additionally, you can add audio, frames or special effects.

In terms of sharing, this product can help you create slide shows, wallpaper, templates or images for cell phones or PDAs. However, Digital Image does not include burning software or the ability to create greeting cards, calendars or other products.

Ease of Use:  

Digital Image 2006 is well designed and organized. Navigation is easy to follow and logical for a program that contains as many options and capabilities as this one. It only takes a little experimentation to use the editing and enhancing options; many of them are one–click edits.

Ease of Installation:  

We encountered no problems while installing or using the trial version. If you are a Microsoft fan, this product should be fully compatible with your other Microsoft products including Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and your Microsoft.NET passport.

Help/Support:  

Digital Image 2006 offers great inter–program help and support including tutorials and a well–written and informative help section. Online help ranges from FAQs to a searchable knowledgebase to a user forum, or you can contact them by telephone.

Summary:  

Digital Image 2006 is a remarkable program for photo organizing, it is bursting with editing and enhancing options–more than the average photographer may ever use. For $34.99, its also a sensible buy.