Get more from your digital photo collection with this intelligent image organiser
MAGIX Photo Manager 10 Deluxe is an interesting graphics application that provides powerful tools to help organise, optimise, maintain and present your digital photo collection.
A powerful selection tool, for instance, can scan your photos to locate duplicates or similar photos. It's able to locate and recognise faces in photos, to a degree, though we noticed some errors in our tests. And most interesting for us was the ability to scan all your photos, automatically picking out the best and most representative images according to the criteria you specify (photos taken at a particular time, say; images that are "attractive"; photos that contain people). We ran this on a large collection of photos, asked it to pick out the best 12, and in just a few seconds it did a great job, genuinely picking out some of the highest quality images.
Elsewhere in the program are more traditional organisational tools, so for instance you can organise your photos into categories or custom albums, making them easier to locate later.
Photo optimisation tools include automatic brightness and colour correction, for example, with manual controls available if you prefer. Image contrast and brightness can be tweaked with a slider, red-eye removed in seconds, skewed photos can be straightened, and built-in presets will apply other useful tweaks in a click. Adjustments can be applied to an entire folder of photos in a click, and the integrated Photo Designer is available when you need more powerful editing tools.
And once you've polished your pictures, and chosen the best shots, they can now be presented and shared in many different ways.
An improved presentation mode allows you to create an attractive slideshow on your own PC, for instance, complete with your own choice of audio soundtrack.
You can upload favourite shots to your very own online album, or send them directly to Facebook, Flickr or YouTube.
And a new Travel Route option shows your photos in the context of an animated map, perfect for illustrating some lengthy driving holiday, like a trip across Europe.
Review by Mike Williams.
