.KEYWORD clubphoto
.FLYINGHEAD PALMPOWER REVIEW
.TITLE Album-To-Go Software makes photo sharing a breeze
.OTHER
.SUMMARY When Club Photo, a photo-sharing Web site that has taken a user-convenience approach to digital image sharing on the Internet, announced it would launch a new Album To Go software program for Palm devices, PalmPower news editor Heather McDaniel was skeptical. However it didn’t take her long to become a Palm device photo-flashing, slide-showing maniac. Find out why in this informative review.
.AUTHOR Heather McDaniel
When Club Photo, a photo-sharing Web site that has taken a user-convenience approach to digital image sharing on the Internet, announced it would launch a new Album To Go software program for Palm devices, I was skeptical. Palm devices only have 16 shades of gray in their displays (older models only four), and JPEG images shared over the Internet start with 65 million. I figured that the Palm device’s little screen wouldn’t be able to easily translate images of 600 x 800 pixels or higher and retain much detail.
But I’ve always liked black-and-white photography, so I decided to set aside my doubts and give this new photos-on-the-Palm device a whirl. I must say it is very, very slick. Within the first few minutes of watching a series of favorite images loop through an automated slide show, I was hooked.
This software works beautifully if your objective is to store and share favorite photographs using your Palm device. In my mind it’s changed from a gimmick to a really great idea.
One reason is that Club Photo did a great job with the translations, turning what I normally experience as a generally business-oriented tool into something you can have some fun with. It’s a lot faster to pull the Album To Go program up on your Palm device’s screen and pass it around the lunch table than to pull those crinkled old photos out of your wallet. And once you get the hang of setting the contrast to best effect, they look pretty good, too.
The program is useful for more than personal purposes although, as a Palm V user with lots of snapshots, that’s what first caught my interest. I have a friend who is a wedding photographer and I can imagine him using a Palm device to show poses to prospective customers. I can imagine that the ability to show photos on the go would also be very useful to people in fields such as real estate and insurance.
The bottom line is, Club Photo has managed to translate full color images extremely well into the shades-of-gray environment of a Palm display. And the software is free, to boot.
.H1 System requirements
Album To Go software runs on the Palm III, Palm IIIe, Palm IIIx, Palm V and Palm VII. If you have a Palm device with IR (infared) capabilities, you can beam your favorite pictures to other Palm users who have Album To Go software loaded on their devices.
I downloaded the free "host" (or maybe "mother ship") Album To Go software from http://www.clubphoto.com. The compressed Zip file package includes a desktop portion, which I use on my AMD K6-2, 350 MHz home-built system, running under Windows 98. The Desktop portion of the software package takes up only about 150K of space on a Windows 95, 98, or NT system that already has the Palm Desktop HotSync Manager installed. The part of the program that stays on the Palm unit is only about 50K, very cheap real estate considering how much power this little program manages to pack. Album To Go software also runs on Power Macintosh systems running MacOS 8.0 with Palm Desktop HotSync Manager installed, though the early Mac versions were reported to have bugs. Because it’s the first release of the Mac software, it’s not too surprising that it’s somewhat of a work in progress.
.H1 It’s so easy…
I tried Album To Go with my Windows 98 system I didn’t notice any bugs and installing the program was easy.
Using it was pretty easy, too. From the desktop, I started Album To Go in standard Windows manner and used it to open several of my favorite JPEG images. I was able to see each image as it looked originally, in color, or see how it would look on the screen of my handheld device by selecting the "Palm" button.
In Figure A, you’ll notice scroll bars around the image — they let you select a portion of an oversized image to fit your Palm unit’s display.
.FIGPAIR A This is what the Album To Go Desktop software looks like in use.
I selected the piece of the picture that I wanted, then converted that and several more images to .PRC format by clicking the Save button. Then I performed a HotSync operation, which sent them to my Palm device for viewing. It was that easy.
Once images were safely synchronized to my Palm V, I was able to show everyone the pictures I had taken of my mom’s cat, my roommate, his gekko, my sister’s wedding pictures, and the current PalmPower office mascot, an annoying Halloween Furby.
.H1 Buttons and menus
There are five small buttons and two large ones on the Album To Go menu screen. The large buttons tell you about Club Photo and start the slide show. The small buttons let you view, rename, view notes, beam, and delete images. However, these buttons are not clearly identified and will require some memorizing. Not to worry, though — dialog boxes pop up so you don’t delete anything accidentally. If you hit the "beam" button with no other Palm device around, it will tell you all about it (trust me on this one)!
.H2 Menus
Select Preference from the App menu, shown in Figure B. You can choose to display an automatic slide show when you launch Album To Go, force four gray scale mode, or create a continuous loop of your slide show. Pictures can stay on the screen from one to 30 seconds, you select the length of time.
.FIG B Choose Preference from the App menu, and you’ll be offered a host of choices.
The Options menu, shown in Figure C, lets you either check all the pictures for the slide show or uncheck them all. You can check or uncheck boxes individually to further tune a slide show. You can also separately set how long each picture will be displayed and even what effects will be used to change images. Effects include tiling, wiping, and so forth. The program would be even better with a "lite" version that simply switches pictures and saves the additional memory for other uses.
.FIG C Options lets you check or uncheck boxes to change your slide show.
.H2 Buttons
The large buttons carry out the program’s most basic functions. For example, the "About" button tells you about Club Photo including the software version number (information which also is available from the "App" menu). The "Slide" button starts the slide show with whatever features you’ve selected.
The small buttons, available from the main menu, are not clearly marked and require some memorization work. The first button on the left displays the highlighted image only. The second button lets you rename the highlighted image. The third lets you add or change a note using the Palm’s keypad or the Graffiti, with its upside-down "V" standing for "A" and so forth. The fourth button lets you beam the highlighted image to another Palm device provided, of course, that Album To Go is installed on the second device. The fifth button deletes the highlighted image, but warns you first.
.H1 Other comments and tips
Here are some other little bits of advice I’ve gleaned on how to make the most of your experience with Album To Go.
.H2 Scroll bar alternatives
The Album To Go Desktop scroll bars work quite intuitively to frame images for the Palm device. However, Album To Go Desktop has limited centering abilities, so I used another photo manipulation program to crop my images more precisely before opening the Album To Go Desktop program. But when that kind of precision isn’t needed, the built-in scroll bars work just fine.
.H2 Something of note
Another neat feature is that notes can be added from the PC, or even while the images are already in your device.
.H2 Don’t be too busy
Images show up best for display on a Palm device when the background isn’t too "busy," but I didn’t have to reduce the 1024 x 768 dpi resolution of my original images before sending them to my device. The software converted them to Palm size on the fly and they looked just fine on my Palm V in 16 levels of gray.
.H2 Shades of gray
I did choose to use 16 levels of gray scale on most of these pictures, since my Palm V will handle that. But the software also offers four levels of gray for older Palm devices or for use with line drawings or the like.
.H2 How many images should you RAM onto your device?
Of course, available RAM limits the number of photos a Palm device will hold. I’ve heard that seven or eight images will fit on a normal, in-use Palm device. However, I got more into my Palm V, which was not loaded down with a whole lot of third-party software. Had I waited for the Palm Vx, with its 8 MB RAM, I might have been able to get crazy and load all of my sister’s wedding pictures onto my device. Figure that each image, at 16 levels of gray, will take up about 13K of space.
.H2 It’s a caution
When downloading the software from theClubPhoto Web site, users would be wise to take note of the Caution file. This file, plus a regular Read Me file which is generally ignored by advanced Palm users, points out some problems that might occur, mostly with older gear. The Read Me file gives instructions for each compatible Palm device and invites users to send in comments about the program.
.H2 Contrast
Experimentation showed me that it’s a good idea to adjust brightness and contrast before putting images into the HotSync queue, since higher contrast shows up significantly better in most cases. If you don’t exaggerate the contrast in this way, images may appear washed out, even at 16 levels of gray.
.H2 Optimal beaming
Even if your Palm device has only four levels of gray, you can still check the 16-level box on the Desktop software in order to make 16-level transfers possible to newer Palm devices if you plan to share images. Album To Go dithers the image to four for you, but if you then beam the image to another Palm with 16 levels gray scale, the image reverts to the higher gray scale resolution.
.PAGE
.H1 About Club Photo
Club Photo’s Web site at http://www.clubphoto.com offers a free membership, including a free Web page where you can post digital photo albums. It also offers free downloadable software for the PC called Living Album. You can HotSync pictures accessed over the Web site to your Palm device by selecting the "Palm" button from the Web page and letting HotSync do the work. The program converts the image so that it’s readable by the Palm.
Album To Go loaded effortlessly and performed as advertised. I thought the fancy image changes were a bit of overkill, and I was unable to beam images to my portable photo printer on the fly. But, on the whole, I think the idea of sharing digital images and making your Palm device a "virtual wallet" is a fantastic idea. Palm device-equipped photo enthusiasts could do worse than to give it a try.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Album To Go check out Club Photo’s Web site at http://www.clubphoto.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6d994
