Ahead Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 4 review

Ahead promises to help you sort your photo collection, but do you really need to?

6 June 2006 0:00 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

Think about how your parents used to store photographs. If they were organised, then you’ll be one of those families with albums with pictures neatly labelled, dated and sorted.

If you’re anything like the rest of us, then shoeboxes stuffed at the back of a wardrobe ruled the day. The same came can be said for the way we store digital pictures today, only they are squirreled away on hard drives and rarely organised.

Nero PhotoShow is one of those neat little applications designed to make you make more of your memories. While there are any number of programs that organise and classify your images, PhotoShow basically is what it says: it’s a slideshow generator that allows you to show your digi-pics off.

In its most basic form you can simply click on a folder and have it displayed but to a large extent you can do this within Windows anyway. PhotoShow starts to come into its own when you start to think how your images will be shown. So, you can select a number of images, or even movie clips, add a title screen as an introduction and start to add effects and transitions to the pictures to help keep your viewers interested. There are as many effects as you could possibly want, which can lead to a case of trying to use all of them in every slideshow, so we’d suggest caution otherwise it ends up looking a little MTV-overload at times. To spice things up even further, you can add MP3 files to add musical accompaniment.

If you’re one of those people who can’t be departed from their family for too long, you can make slideshows into screensavers or even a desktop background that cycles through your favourite images. This features are resource sucking so make sure you have plenty of RAM in your machine or you’ll soon switch the feature off.

If you haven’t got any phot-editing software, you needn’t worry to much as the package comes with basic tools that allows you to get rid of common programs, such as red-eye, poor composition as well as brightness and contrast controls. Considering the price of the price of the package, these are a great addition that we would normally cost you the same amount again.

You needn’t worry about storing your final creations on your own computer, as you can save the results off to CD-R or DVD. With support for either MPEG or AVI, you can share them with family and friends easily. For those who are truly impressed with their slideshows, you can even go so far as to post them onto the web, as the package comes with Nero’s Photoshow Circle membership, which is effectively a section of Nero’s website dedicated to PhotoShow.

Verdict

Designed with the first-time user in mind, PhotoShow isn’t a serious application, more a fun way to pass a couple of hours and show your images in new and interesting ways.

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Review Recap

Made by: A
Price as reviewed: £25
Latest price: Compare prices
The good: Cheap, easy to use, fun
The bad: No real need
Quick verdict: Designed to create interesting slideshows of your favourite digi-snaps, this is a trouble free and easy way to show off
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