This simple application enables you to generate stunning Flash photo albums in a quick, easy way. The program includes a wide selection of templates ready to be used and supports background music as well. All you need to do is select a template, choose the photos and music for your album and let Fortop do the job.

The albums can be generated as HTML documents or SWF files, which include images, sound, transition effects, EXIF data and even a slideshow. Luckily enough the program is quite easy to use: otherwise you'd find yourself in trouble, because the Help section needs serious improvement.

Download Fortop Album Creator 1.1 build 70901 in Softonic

Overview

The jAlbum interface has improved a lot in recent versions, and is now a clean, clear slate for exploring your pictures and quickly selecting the ones you want to put into your album. Once you've imported photos, you can rearrange them, remove the ones you don't like, add captions and generally make lots of tweaks to make the most of them. jAlbum also includes a nice set of basic editing tools.

Features

jAlbum's strongest feature is certainly making albums. You've got a view options here - you can make an album to view locally on your PC, upload it to a jAlbum account, or upload it to you own web server. This is very easy to do and jAlbum comes with a number of styles to start out with. You can also download more skins from the developer's website.

You can also share your published albums via a vast selection of different social networks, Facebook and Twitter included.

One minor complaint with the jAlbum is that for an album creation app, it doesn't have as many sharing options as we'd like. It could definitely do with the ability to post to places like Facebook straight from the app as opposed to having to first publish an album before sharing. We also missed the opportunity to add music outside of having to use a custom skin for it, a touch that would make some albums really special.

With a good set of editing tools, and a straightforward process, the free jAlbum makes for a great way of creating photo albums to share with your friends.

Download jAlbum 10.10.8 in Softonic

Photo! Web Album offers and easy way to create photo galleries for the web with an emphasis on being user friendly and usable. This makes Photo! Web Album ideal for beginners who aren't looking for anything that looks great but works quickly and in a straightforward manner. From the moment of installation of Photo! Web Album, you're asked how you would like to post your photos to the web via a built-in wizard which makes it simple to use.

There's no need to worry about hosting either - Photo! Web Album allows you to share your photo albums on the developer's own website although how much space you've got here is not clear but it's likely it's not particularly generous. What's nice though is that by using the Photo! Web Album service, you can edit your photo presentation and online creations from the Photo! Web Album desktop interface. All changes are made in realtime so there's no waiting around for the server to catch up with edits you make. Photo! Web Album also lets you add subfolders of photos related to another subject which means that it's actually a better way to organise your photos than even Picassa.

Basic photo editor, uploader and hosting in one, Photo! Web Album is a competitive solution for novices or those new to photo uploading.

Download Photo! Web Album 1.1 in Softonic

The good thing about this tool is that it takes care of everything. The whole album creation process is totally automatic. All you have to do is select the pictures you want to include in the album, choose a template and export the result to HTML.

Being that easy, creating a web photo album is a matter of minutes. However, the downside to such an automatic creative process is that there's little room, if any, for customization options.

Download Web Photo Album 0.9 Beta in Softonic

JetPhoto Studio doesn't really compare with the big boys but it does offer a greater degree of control and processing power over your images in certain areas. JetPhoto Studio will import pictures from your camera as soon as you connect it. Alternatively, you can browse to albums on your PC or allow JetPhotoStudio to perform a full scan of your system.

The main interface is well presented and allows you to browse photos by date. There is a set of basic editing tools which allows you to crop images and add a few effects such as sepia, black and white, image contrast, and auto enhancing. You can also batch resize your photos and protect them with a watermark. JetPhoto Studio also enables you to rate your own photos via a star system, as well as tag them. However, tags are not transferable from one album to another and you have to create a new one every new album you create.

One of the better aspects of JetPhoto Studio is the ability to create screensavers, wallpapers, slide-shows and Flash movies from your collections. Unfortunately, however, there ¡s very little control over the types of animations and speed of the transitions. Finally, it's worth adding that you send JetPhoto Studio images via SMS or infrared, to your friends’ mobiles, although this only works within the US. The developer has also recently added geo-tagging for GPS recognition in Google Earth. The best way to share your photos in online though and JetPhoto Studio makes this relatively easy via Flickr or the JetPhoto server.

Jet Photo Studio is a comprehensive photo management tool that's a bit bloated in areas but offers some interesting features.

Download JetPhoto Studio 4.11 in Softonic

Using Hofmann Digital Album is very easy, thanks to the program's step-by-step album setup process and intuitive customization interface. All you have to do is select a few basic settings for your album, such as cover, design and number of pages, and choose the photos you want to include in it. Note that you must select complete folders, not individual files.

Once the initial setup is complete, you're ready to start customizing album details. Hofmann Digital Album displays your album in a multi-paned interface, with different areas for selected photos, album pages and extra effects – which you can apply just by dragging and dropping them onto the album’s page.

Hofmann Digital Album includes tons of different covers, page layouts, album backgrounds, clipart, masks and frames to turn your photo album into a truly personal work of art. The Preview function enables you to check the album’s final appearance before ordering it online. You can also download images from your favorite social networks like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa.

With Hofmann Digital Album you can easily turn a collection of digital pictures on your computer into a fully customized printed photo album.

Download Hofmann Digital Album 8.5 in Softonic

Everything is explained and taken step by step until your gallery is online with no further effort required on your part. To get going, first of all you're asked which image files you want to upload. Secondly, you're asked what title you want to give the album and the layout parameters - how big, what style etc. Then, you simply click "Build" and the software whizzes into action building a perfect HTML gallery, complete with thumbnails, for publishing on the net.

Once ready, you are given detailed control over exactly how you want the gallery to look such as by changing the thumbnails to full image size, the titles, layout gallery style, border colors etc. If you see another gallery online that you like developed using Gallery Designer, you can even borrow that template or alternatively, design your own.

With support for for a wide range of video and photo formats and even support for text files, Gallery Designer takes the pain out of coding your own online gallery.

Download Gallery Designer 1.0.9 in Softonic

The application provides a very robust system for handling large photo collections in a more efficient manner, and reminded me a lot of the excellent iPhoto on the Mac. All you need to do is connect your digicam to your PC and the rest of the work is done for you in terms of synchronisation and classification.

As the photos are imported, you can whip them into shape using a range of tools from the labs of Sony. As well as the ubiquitous rotation and cropping functions, you can perform colour and brightness adjustments, cut elements from images, treat red eye, etc. In terms of advanced editing features, it is lacking somewhat but to pick the program up on this point is to miss the point of Photo Go, which is to provide a means of collating and organising your pictures in one convenient place, which it does very well.

Download Sony Photo Go 1.0 in Softonic

It's really easy to nowadays to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of pictures you take. Between your digital camera, smartphone and scanned picture hard copies, you can soon be into the hundreds or thousands when it comes to digital images stored on your PC.

FileStream pcPhotos helps you get your photo collection in order by letting you create custom albums for specific groups of photos. Its easy to use interface looks a bit plain, but navigation is a snap. Just pick and choose photos and then import them to FileStream pcPhotos.

A nice, useful feature of FileStream pcPhotos is the ability to batch resize a group of up to 200 photos to make them easier to share on certain web-based accounts. Photos seemed to have retained a good quality upon resize too in tests, which is a nice plus. After resizing, you can also opt to rearrange the order in which you imported them into FileStream pcPhotos in the first place by simply dragging and dropping.

FileStream pcPhotos also offers some basic effects and editing functions to pretty up your photos. You can flip or mirror image photos, change color images to black and white, or even add captions, timestamps or watermarks. If you're not satisfied with your changes, one quick click will revert your photo back to the original.

Sharing is also pretty simple with FileStream pcPhotos. The app lets you share your finished albums via email, iTunes, Facebook or Flickr.

FileStream pcPhotos is a great choice if you're looking for a multi-purpose photo editing and sharing program.

Download FileStream pcPhotos 3.0 in Softonic

The principal feature of the utility is its ability to import photos from any source (either on your PC or direct from your camera) and sort them into albums. Things are made easier thanks to the inclusion of an Import Wizard, making it great for those taking their first steps in digital photography. However, this method can get a little annoying after a while, and seasoned users are likely to be left dreaming of drag-and-drop capabilities, which are notably absent from PhotoMeister.

If you’re the type of person who likes to bore everyone with your holiday photos then PhotoMeister opens up a world of possibilities. The tools under the ‘Impress’ menu give you a plethora of options for sharing images, allowing you to insert them into web pages, slideshows, email, photo books, screensavers, PDA albums or burn to CD. Although the quality of the web album templates isn’t great, it provides a very quick way of sharing your latest escapades with everyone, with no technical knowledge required.

Image editing is not PhotoMeister’s strong point, and it’s lacking in the kind of advanced manipulation features you’d find in Photoshop Album or Paint Shop Pro Album. Having said this, it contains a neat one click optimization function, which auto adjusts the picture to make it as pleasing on the eye as possible. There’s also a batch conversion mode to help you speed up the process of applying a change to multiple images.

If you’re looking for something to help you manage and share your pictures more easily, Photomeister is great, especially if you’re new to computing. Just remember, that you’ll need an external image editor alongside it to get the best out of your digital pictures.

Download PhotoMeister 2.6 in Softonic

The Picasa for Windows 8 home screen is divided into 3 parts to access this content - Albums, Recent and Explore. When you look into the options, you'll see that you're able to view your images in slide shows, zoom in on photos, comment on them, view the exif data or share your pictures with a variety of other applications.

Download Picasa Albums for Windows 8 in Softonic

This program automatically generates a Flash website that you can use to display your images on the Internet. There's no need to code anything in Flash or any other complicated programming language; you only have to select the pictures you want to show, choose the layout, add some optional background music and upload the whole project to your web space via FTP.

The downside to it, besides the obvious fact that you need an FTP space, is that the program, at least in my opinion, is not as easy to use as it seems at first sight. There are too many fields to be filled in and too many parameters to be tweaked. Being a program intended to users without any technical knowledge, I think the program should try to make the whole process a bit more graphical and more intuitive. Also, there are only two templates available.

Gallerymanager is the easiest way to create Flash photo galleries to publish online; it's a bit limited, but you don't need any Flash knowledge.

Download Gallerymanager 2.0 in Softonic

What's new in Picasa 3

The latest version of Picasa includes sharing on Google+, including sharing of name tags. You'll enjoy the range of new effects that have been added, allowing you to quickly make stylish changes to your photos. Side by side editing means you can keep an original copy of your photo for reference while you're making experiementing with effects and levels.

What's inside Picasa

Google Picasa features enriching options to manage, edit, and show off your photos in an even more comfortable way, both offline and online – thanks to the Picasa Web Album syncing tool.

It includes Picasa Photo Viewer, which you can configure to replace the original Windows default image viewer. It offers more tools and displays photos on a much nicer interface when viewing them directly in Windows Explorer, so when Picasa asks you if you want to use it, don't hesitate!

How Picasa works

Picasa displays all your indexed photos in a handy folder structure. You can let the program scan the whole drive in search for pictures or select specific directories. A double click on any image will display it in full screen and let you access to a handful of basic editing tools: cropping, straightening, adjusting color and light or fixing red eye, among others.

The possibilities are endless

But Picasa is not only about viewing and fixing images. You can also give free rein to your imagination with its tools to create posters, collages, screensavers and even movies. The greatest thing about these tools is not only the fact that they give you the ability to create something unique and original with your photos; it's also that they're surprisingly easy to use, and don't require any tech abilities or photo editing skills at all.

Conclusion

The all-new Picasa has successfully completed what seemed a difficult task: improving a software app that was already very good.

Download Picasa 3.9.136.12 in Softonic