Review by Cthulhu

Absent a much higher end and usually much more expensive tool, CyberLynk’s PhotoDirector 5 does the job as an editor but it’s not even remotely as easy or quick as it claims to be. I won’t be using it as a content manager.

Yes, you can manage photos but it’s not ‘effortlessly’. My main problem with most tools that offer to do content ‘management’ on my behalf is that they claim to know the ‘right way’ which is usually their own rigid way of imposing ‘order’ into my private universe and it tends to clash with ‘my way’. A tool unable to compromise if not let me keep ‘my way’ of organizing things becomes an annoyance and the opposite of ‘useful’ because all it does is slow me down. PhotoDirector’s content management model clashes with mine and reconciliation may not be possible or it didn’t happen after a few weeks of use. Its insistence of swallowing all my photos into what it calls ‘projects’ and ‘albums’ might make sense if you get PhotoDirector the day you start taking digital shots but it’s a pain if you already have 5000 or 10,000 photos around, already organized by some other criteria. I expected more flexibility.

Yes, photo processing can be fast but, as always, there is a correlation between speed and quality and touching the program-provided magic wands that should do auto adjustments for the better don’t always produce a better photo. In fact, the better your original shot was, the higher the odds are that you get something worse if you try to process it with the auto options. Yes, creative photo editing is possible but you don’t get half the tools that, let’s say, Photoshop would give you. And there’s, of course, the learning curve whenever dealing with an unfamiliar user interface but that can be overcome in time. PhotoDirector is quite Okay as an editing tool, it really is and it’s possible to get better and better results as you become more familiar with the tools.

Sadly, the photo editor is tightly integrated with the ‘manager’ part meaning that if you have no use for the manager, the only way to ‘liberate’ your contents from PhotoDirector’s rigid structure is to grab your work as soon as it’s done and move it someplace where your photos are organized the way you want them organized.

Overall, the package is a pretty nice but not ‘pro’ quality photo editing tool that’s too tightly integrated into a photo management scheme I won’t accept. Three stars, exclusively on the editor’s merits should be a fair rating.