With digital scrapbooking programs and Web sites cluttering the landscape, it can be difficult to pick the one that fits your needs. MemoryMixer is a highly adaptable scrapbooking program flexible enough to suit just about everyone.

Memory Mixer will tax users with older systems, but if you can get past the system requirements, it is quite useful. The installation consumes nearly 700MB of storage on your drive. Install the extras and the installation will be about 3GB. It also needs a reasonably powerful system to run. Recommended is a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 or better processor and 1GB or more of memory, although it will run on less. Running on a system a bit faster than the recommendation, it seemed a little bit sluggish. After installation, Memory Mixer will lead you to its site for registration. You can also join the Memory Mixer family. Joining is not required but will give you access to more creative freebies.

When you open MemoryMixer, two sequential interfaces pop up, prompting you to start or open an album and then to build from scratch or use Quick-Mix. Choose to create a new album from scratch and MemoryMixer will prompt you to name your album and select the orientation (portrait, landscape, or square) and one of dozens of layouts. You can also start with a blank page.

Once you have the basics down, buttons on the left side of the display let you add photo frames, embellishments, titles, shapes, music, or video to your album. Using the Edit Photo button, you can perform basic photo edits (crop, remove red eye, etc.) and more.

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Tags: Application

ACDsee is bucking the trend for combining photo-editing and management tools in one application. Photo Editor 4 does just that, editing. If you want to organize your photo library you’ll have to pay extra for Acdsee 10 Photo Manager. Having said that, Acdsee Photo Editor is around half the price of some of the other applications in this group test and there is a special bundle price for the two applications on the ACDSee website which still comes in well below $50. So the choice is yours and it is good value either way.

So to the Editor which, at first glance, has a bit of a retro look about it. The central image window is surrounded on three sides by a toolbar, image basket and on the right a palette dock containing how-to guidance, adjustment filters and an object palette. Expanding the how-to palette reveals ACDSee’s hidden treasure: a stack of guided projects covering the gamut from basic editing to photo fixing and creative projects.

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