Ulead PhotoImpact was the first major bitmap editor to recognise the need to focus on digital camera owners, introducing PhotoImpact Album to enable thumbnail-based image management. In fact, Album is still included with PhotoImpact, but you’re expected to manage your photos with the bundled PhotoExplorer 8.6.

Photo Explorer offers plenty of power – such as multimedia and ZIP support – but its on-the-fly folder-based approach is old-fashioned. In fact, if you dig deep enough, you’ll discover that Photo Explorer also offers the ability to create a combined album displaying all the photos in specified folders, and even offers a calendar-based view of this. It should be the best of both worlds, but, in practice, the album handling strains at the seams when managing thousands of images, and the lack of any tagging capabilities, beyond applying captions and ratings, is a major drawback. To top it all, the Photo Explorer interface is just too old-fashioned and unattractive to want to spend any serious time with.

Photo Explorer offers red-eye and distortion removal filters, some automatic fixes and a dedicated wizard designed to walk you through basic image enhancement. Much more power is available in PhotoImpact, which offers dozens of adjustment and photographic filters, as well as retouching tools.

The downside is that the interface and its range of options are confusing, and filter dialogs are too. Ulead has recognised this and added Express Fix, complete with a full-screen central preview alongside corrections for exposure, colour, saturation, focus and skin quality. Unfortunately, there are no hands-on tools, and the preview thumbnails are too small to be useful. Where PhotoImpact’s preview-based approach scores is in terms of creative power and, using the thumbnail-based EasyPalette, you can explore and apply hundreds of effects.

You can also create cards, CD covers and calendars, based on supplied samples ready for print or email. Further sharing options are offered in Photo Explorer. You can create slideshows, set up a default transition and then burn the results to VCD, MPEG or AVI. Finally, you can output images to simple thumbnail or slideshow-based web galleries, but you’ll have to find your own hosting solution.

PhotoImpact was once the best PC photo editor, but it now looks dated and confusing compared to today’s more streamlined options.