Photoshop Album 2 Vs Photoshop Elements 3

Picasa is a free product. Photoshop Album is available in a free Starter Edition and a paid version. I use the paid version, but all the tagging capabilities I love from a photo management standpoint are in the free one. So you can certainly go with it, if that’s the primary thing you want — good photo management.

The $50 fee based version provides extra features such as the ability to make video CDs, more picture editing tools and other goodies .

I’ve been patiently waiting to see if Photoshop Album 3 would be released, to fix some of the small things I’ve wanted. Nope — no word from Adobe, despite being registered with them. Nope, no news on the web site.

But in working on this story, I discovered that the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 DOES have some of those features. Previously, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Album were different programs that worked together. Now, Photoshop Elements contains all the photo management capabilities of Photoshop Album plus improvements.

Downside? The cost is $100. Upside? This version DOES write IPTC data to your files (and yes, keyword phrases are preserved). So, you can easily organize your pictures, tagging them with drag-and-drop, and the information is written within the photo files themselves.

For me, it’s a no brainer to upgrade. I’ve already made an investment of time into Photoshop Album. Moving into Photoshop Elements gives me the upgrades I want. The only downside I see so far is the fact that once tagged, the program doesn’t appear to allow you to retag files.

For someone new to all this and not wanting to spend, staying with Photoshop Album 2 may make more sense. Down the line, I would imagine that someone would come up with a migration tool to embed your data. Better, hopefully Adobe will upgrade the tool. If not, download the trial version of Photoshop Elements, import your photos, write your keywords in IPTC format and move on to another program.