SendPhotos Gold

Reviewed by: Lianne Reitter, July 2004
Published by: SendPhotos, Inc.
Requires: Windows 98 through Vista; will run under Virtual PC for Mac users; Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, 15MB hard drive space required for installation; Mac OS X—product will run under Virtual PC
MSRP: $29.95 (download)

If you have family or friends, a digital camera or a scanner, you undoubtedly know the pains involved in sending pictures over the Internet. SendPhotos allows you to easily send your pictures over the Internet in a friendly, instantly viewable format using colorful backgrounds, frames and caption text. Novatix has released this new "Gold" version and much to my delight, I got to review my all time favorite piece of software. For those of you who may have missed my review of the first release of SendPhotos let me give you an idea of what this gem does and how it works.

You may not think that attaching photos to e-mail is really that difficult, but remember those on the receiving end? I got really tired of getting pictures from my sister-in-law of my new niece’s nostrils. The pictures were so large, that’s all I could see of my niece without endless scrolling, until I saved the attachment to my hard drive and viewed it using another piece of software. And then I would get five or six pictures of their trip to the beach in one e-mail and by the time I was able to actually view the last picture I didn't even care anymore; it was too long and too convoluted a process until SendPhotos came along.

This beautiful piece of software installs easily. Launch the program and it immediately presents you with a familiar Windows Explorer-like interface from which you can choose the pictures you want to send. Once your choices have been made you proceed to the layout area where you can pick the background or stationery, the size of your pictures, the frames you want to use, shadow effects, text color and how you want to pictures to line up in the final e-mail.

 

Once you are satisfied with your creation, a simple click of the finish button brings up your e-mail software and you are ready to send your pictures. You need only pick the lucky recipients.

For those of you who already know the wonders of SendPhotos there is great news. It’s even better! There are several new features in SendPhotos Gold that will delight and inspire. First, you can now edit your photos on the fly. By mousing over the picture in the layout screen , a little yellow help pop-up lets you know that you can click on the picture once to enter the editing menu. You can quickly and easily crop your picture, correct brightness and contrast levels, even get rid of red-eye. These editing features are nowhere near what you might find in full photo editing software packages, but for sending your digital pictures quickly, and just the way you want them, you'll find they are just what you need.

The second truly brilliant addition in SendPhotos Gold is the ability to make your own stationery. Now I wouldn't have thought this a necessity at all as the stationery available for free download from the SendPhotos web site is voluminous, well designed and really quite creative. However, now that I can make my own, I've been thinking of all sorts of different ideas using my own pictures and my collection of clip art.

The greatest custom stationery application would be creating SendPhotos pages for your personal web site. That brings me to the third great new feature in SendPhotos Gold: the ability to export your final creation as an HTML page. Now creating and formatting your web pages couldn't possibly get any easier than this.

SendPhotos Gold is worth it’s weight in it . . . gold that is, which makes the purchase price an absolute bargain. There is even a fully detailed electronic manual at the web site to take you through the product step-by-step. But don't stop with just buying a copy for yourself. Remember that saying “’Tis better to give than to receive?" Well in this case if you gift registered copies of SendPhotos to your family and friends you will receive their pictures in a manner far more pleasurable than the old fashioned way. No more niece’s nostrils! I love this software. Highly recommended.

 

 

 




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