Corel describes its new Snapfire application as a “next-generation modular digital imaging platform”, designed to provide “all the tools users need to easily organise, enhance and share their digital photos”. It sounds ideal, especially since it’s free from Snapfire.com.

In terms of organisation, Snapfire provides a simple photo downloader for transferring camera images to your hard disk. Then, you can quickly add photos as resizable thumbnails to the simple folder-based view, which can be sorted based on name, date, format, size and rating. There’s also a rudimentary Calendar view, a Photo Tray palette in which you can temporarily store images ready for printing and sharing, and a Photo Info palette, where you can add ratings and captions. However, there’s no keyword tagging, so the basic search is limited to date and file size.

Double-clicking on a thumbnail opens the image for editing. The Quick Fix command offers one-click enhancement, while the Photo Fix dialog offers customisable control over brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth and focus. Otherwise, the editing power comes down to cropping and red-eye-fixing tools, and just two filters for applying either mono or sepia effects.

When it comes to sharing, you can drag and drop photos onto a range of preset templates for producing multiple prints, album pages, greeting cards, calendars and collages. The process is visual and straightforward, but the lack of real hands-on control is frustrating. Even more disappointing are the electronic sharing capabilities. It boils down to sending photos as emails, with basic control over image size and choosing to attached or embed images. Finally, you can email “Snapfire shows” to other users.

For control over transitions, sound­tracks and pans and zooms, you’ll need to upgrade to Snapfire Plus ($57). This also offers keyword tagging and the ability to back up your files to CD, but at this price it should offer a great deal more. Neither version of Snapfire offers any web-sharing capabilities – the Show section of Snapfire.com asks you to send photos for consideration and possible display.

This is a first release and Corel clearly has plans to update and expand what Snap­fire has to offer. But, as it stands, the program isn’t next-generation; it’s half-baked.