FlipAlbum Professional review

Flip Album Review
by Lance Albright

Do you want to be able to post your still images on the Internet and let your friends and family check them out? Maybe you need to create an online sales brochure with photos of your products? Possibly you are a professional photographer or multimedia artist and need a way to display, promote and market your images and content. Check out Flip Album.

FlipAlbum enables you to easily and quickly create collections of your digital images and arrange them into virtual photo albums. Just like a typical photo album, you can have various pages with single images or a multitude of shots. You can set up the finished projects to play as a slide show or in the album book format.

You can also import multimedia files like music, video clips and animation You can share your finished FlipAlbum project via email or burn them onto a CD or DVD. . Of course, by using the built-in FTP program, or your own web upload program, you can import and embedded the completed Flip Album files on your personal or business web site.

If you don't own your own web site, you can upload your FlipAlbum to a free site maintained by FlipAlbumBy sending out the URL and pass codes to your fiends and relatives, they can access the multimedia presentation online. Don’t get too excited, you only get about 5 MB of space. Five high-resolution images can easily eat all that up….

Here are the two main gotchas for FlipAlbum - Web visitors will need the free FlipViewer program to view your completed online projects. However, the viewer is free and is only about 2 Mb of so. The bigger gotcha is that FlipAlbum is for Windows only. It does not support Macintosh or other operating systems.

Go to the web site at www.flipalbum and checkout some of the demo FlipAlbums. If you can view them, then consider FlipAlbum as a viable choice for your image sharing needs.

FlipAlbum for Professionals

If you are a professional photographer or content creator, you can use the Flip Album software as way of protecting, distributing and selling your images. This is the high end Flip Album Professional version for $149.95. There are two less expensive versions - FlipAlbum – FlipAlbum 5 Standard for $29.95 and FlipAlbum 5 Suite for 79.95. . You can download and try out their free trial versions of all three products from their web site

All three versions enable you to import almost any common image format including jpg, tif, bmp, etc. You can import images one by one or an entire folder full of images at a time. If you need to fix up your digital images a bit, all three Flip Album versions include useful photo editing and formatting tools like image cropping, color correction, dimensions, contrast, red eye reduction, etc. All three enable you to easily create a wide range of photo albums and share them via email or by posting on the web. All three versions can embed common video and audio multimedia files, adding of special themes and borders to the pages, search functions, and the adding of text and annotations.

The Flip Album Suite version adds the ability to burn CDs that can be played backed in most CD and DVD players. The Professional version adds the ability to create and sell photo album CDs as image collections and promotional packages. As you can include multimedia files, you can use the Pr version to sell and market video clips and stock footage as well. This includes embedding your URL in the books and assigning passwords so only approved customers can access the images. You can also protect your images by using encryption, watermarks and print locking.

The system requirements are not that tough – all you need is a PII running 300 MHz or better, 64 MB of RAM, any version of Windows, and about 80 MB of free hard drive space. Sorry Apple users, this is for Windows only. If you want to burn CDs of course, you will need a CD burner. By the way, here is the biggest gotcha – Flip Album CDs cannot be read by Macintosh computers- Windows only. If you are sharing your albums with others, they will need to use the free FlipAlbum viewer software to open up the files. Even though it is free, the viewer is a 2 MB file that can take a while to download over a slow Internet connection.

Playing with the Program

I tested the Pro version and was quite impressed. Inside the product box was a nice fabric CD holder with the program CD as well as extra CDs that contain hundreds of MP3 music files, clip art, borders, frames and mat outlines for the various Photo Album pages.

Flip Album successfully passed my “Aunt Jane” test. In other words, after loading it up on the computer and without reading the instruction manual, I was able to figure how to create my Flip Album and get it to display. However, to really utilize the program required studying the manual, as there are some tricks to watch out for.

Depending on the size of the photo, each page can consist of just a single image or a crowd of images, designs and captions. The hardest part was remembering to use the menu for accessing and editing, rather than just clicking on the page like with most Microsoft Windows programs. If you click on the page, it automatically flips to the next page rather than selecting that particular page. You first have to go to the edit menu to use "Select Object" command. Once I got used to that, it was a lot easier to edit the images and individual pages.

By the way, if you are planning to share your completed FlipAlbums over the web, you might want to use an image editing program to reduce the file sizes of your images before you import them into the Flip Album program.

I was able to put multiple images on each page, rotate them a bit off center and add a little background color to spice it up. You can superimpose the images over one another, creating a montage on each page. The program also includes basic image editing which allows you to control the size, color, contrast, etc.

The annotation tool made it easy to adding captions and descriptions next to eh photos or superimposed over them.. The only trick was that for re-sizing the annotation window, one has to click on the lower right hand size of the frame, rather than any corner like in most Windows programs. As expected, you get a choice of fonts, styles and colors for your text.

You can pick different backgrounds, themes and graphic images for each page. Flip Album provides a nice selection of themes, textures and book covers to pick from. You even add background music. The extra content CDs provides an almost overwhelming selection of extra page themes, borders, clip art and even background music clips to choose from.

It is also easy to add video by using the Insert Multimedia menu. The opening frame will be displayed on the page with a video icon in the corner. By moving the mouse over the icon, a VCR control video player graphic will open up and enable you to see the video.

Once your project FlipAlbum is completed, you can save it and then watch it either as a photo album flipping through the various pages or as a slide show. You can share with others by printing it all out, copying the image and book files from computer to computer, or by burning to a CD or DVD, In addition, you can upload the finished project to FlipAlbum’s free web hosting site and then send emails to your fiends and relatives to come check it out. FlipAlbum also includes an FTP option to make it possible to uploading the finished project to your personal or business site.

Check it out. Flip Album is a fun and powerful image and multimedia display product that can be of value to the home and family event photographer as well as to the professional photographer and content creator. Just remember, this product is for Windows only. Download the free version and see if it meets your needs.

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