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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography FlipAlbum
Pro I’ve been on the search for a piece of software that would allow for easy and effective viewing of images from a CD. With every indication being that I would be shooting weddings (and just about everything else) digitally in 2007 (or earlier) I had to think about what I would need to present images in a smooth flowing fashion. In the days of film, it was easy. Shoot, drop off film at lab, pickup film and proof prints, sort/edit and insert into 4x6 proof albums, present to clients. If the photographer offered enlargements, the client would just mark off which photos they wanted reprinted or enlarged. You could still do the same with digital, as I’m sure many still do produce 4x6 proofs from the digital files, but why? Digital is a different and liberating medium compared to film with more options available. There’s no need to be stuck still producing actual 4x6 proofs, but there’s still a need to be able to review proof images, if not prints. You can do the web gallery, which allows everyone interested to check out the photos conveniently through the Internet, but there’s bandwidth issues and limitations and unless you do the gallery manually, you’re stuck with using an off-the-shelf template offered by any number of applications, including Photoshop. However, I find these templates to be quite restrictive and while I can edit manually and adjust various settings, the workload gets to be too much to warrant too much effort on my part. Remember, the more time you spend dicking around with fussy and/or unnecessary work, the more money you lose in opportunity costs in not doing something more productive. Creating web galleries from scratch is one of those unproductive bits of work that I’d rather not be doing given all the other editing that I would have to do for a digital wedding. What I really wanted was an application that would could be burned to a CD and automatically load up a gallery of images. Heck, if the application could resemble a traditional proof album, so much the better to give the clients some consistency and easy transition from film proofing to digital proofing. Being able to playback some background music would also be nice along with adding in custom text if desired. And it should be simple for an idiot like me to use. In a similar search for a slideshow program, I spent a couple of years in the wilderness working with primitive slideshow programs that could do some of what I wanted, but had some brutal limitations. Some slideshow programs require hours to configure one bloody 4-minute show because you have to manually configure the slides to the length of a song. Endless playing and testing was required to see where the slides would end versus when the song would end and if you didn’t get it right down to the second, you had to go back and manually configure the slideshow again, almost from scratch. When I finally found about ProShow Gold it was a Godsend and spending US $70 on it was cheap for all the time it would save me in easily creating and editing slide shows. That isn’t to say that ProShow Gold is perfect, as it has issues if you’re really demanding in producing huge slideshows and trying to burn a DVD may end up stalling. The fix is to create an ISO image of the show and then burn it to DVD using your own burning software. My first professional use of ProShow Gold was literally minutes before a client was to arrive at my friend’s studio to review the wedding photos we had taken. During the film processing stage, we had the scans created by the Fuji Frontier printing system saved to CD for our own records (much cheaper than getting duplicates prints made). I used those scans to create a slideshow from scratch in about 25 minutes and ready for viewing just as the clients arrived and sat down in the studio. Success was guaranteed when the bride started to tear up watching the show. For the proof image software, I was looking for an equivalent to ProShow Gold in ease of use, but with power and flexibility. I found Flip Album and it is almost everything that I’ve been looking for in a proofing application. A completed Flip Album is for all intent and purpose, a digital proof album. Open an album and after the Flip Album viewer loads up, you see a book on the right side of the screen. Using the mouse button to click on the cover opens up the book and depending on the options chosen during the creation stage, you may see a series of thumbnails followed by a contents page, followed by the image pages.
Mouse clicking on the pages flips either forward or backwards and there’s even an audible page flipping sound every time you flip. This audible gets tiring quickly and I turn it off during the creating process.
You can configure the number of images seen on the page from one to several, but as my need is for proofing, I prefer posting only one image per page so that the image will be of good size on the monitor.
Background music can be set using MP3 or Wav files, but I highly recommend that you use MP3 files of modest size and fidelity so as not to bog down the page viewing and flipping by using a massive Wav file.
I mentioned that you may see some thumbnails right at the beginning of the digital book, but I don’t choose this option because the thumbnails are actually links to magnified views of each image. Because I choose only a single image per page, these magnified views are not necessary because the single page image is almost the same size as the magnified view. This option is only necessary if you choose to place multiple smaller images on each page. The magnified viewing is also slow and clumsy too when using an auto run CD (actually, even hard drive viewing is slow).
You can insert or delete pages within the book as you deem necessary and the application will take care of the table of contents and index pages. I like to separate the beginning table of contents from the image pages if there isn’t already a natural page break available. On the blank page, I’ll use the annotation option to copy and paste in mushy poetry in some sort of script font. Oh yes, for the very first page that opens up in the book, I also annotate the couple’s name, date, location, and my name with contact information, as a record keeping function. This way if the couple decides to copy the CD and distribute it to their friends and relatives, they’ll know who the photographer is.
My needs are usually pretty basic. I don’t need much of frills and gimmicks available from an application because I could spend far too many hours editing away trying every little thing. As long as the application can do what I desire in an fast and efficient fashion then I’m a happy camper, but just as ProShow Gold is not perfect, neither is Flip Album.
Some things to consider or watch out for Don’t use massive files for the images or the background music. The larger the files the slower the flip album will be to load and view back from CD. Flip Album copies the original files to CD to create the digital proof book, but it won’t resize the files for best viewing like the way Pro Show Gold does for slide shows. So, instead of pointing Flip Album to your folder of full resolution TIFF files made from your Nikon D2X or Canon 1Ds Mk II, batch process them to a file size no more than about 100 kb – JPEGs about 800x500 pixels, saved at medium quality should be all that you need. Think in terms of fast viewing for a web gallery and you’ll be in the ballpark. Don’t waste your time with the VCD or DVD options, stick to auto run CD because the other two options are either abysmal for quality or too fussy to deal with. I was hoping for a slick DVD option that would allow the client to playback the album on a home DVD player and use the back or forward buttons on the remote to flip through the pages, but creating a DVD is a hokey process and pretty disappointing for a program that costs US $160 to purchase (the Pro version).
The VCD is an easier process, but again, quality is so low grade that I would be ashamed to have my name attached to any VCD created through Flip Album. Flip Album really needs to beef up the VCD and DVD options if they’re going to offer them, because they’d be better off not offering them as options. Pro Show Gold really shames Flip Album for a much superior CD/VCD/DVD creation process in an application that’s less than half the cost. Flip Album uses the folder name for the front cover name, but this is not right. I should be able to choose the name I want to place on the front cover in the font and size that I want. Speaking of folders, don’t use “+” or anything else out of the ordinary in your folder name because this will corrupt the Flip Album and produce nothing more than a coaster from your CD. The “&” was once an issue but has apparently been fixed, but I happen to use “+” in one of my albums and produced 3-4 coasters before I wised up. And since I’m harping on folder names, I should also note that you should use a simple naming structure for your image files. I’ve settled on a straight three-digit numbering system and I set the option to show this file number at the bottom of the page. This allows the client to simply indicate that they want numbers 1, 3, 35, 145, etc. from the color album and 8, 24, 78, 156, etc. from the B&W album for enlargements. The simple number naming also avoids the rather annoying tendency for pre Windows XP operating systems to cluster files based on the first digit rather than true numerical order. For example, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 , 14, etc. you may get 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 100, 2, 20, 21, 23, 23, 24, etc. For my first test albums, I had B&W images labeled as BW (1) and so on to however many B&W images I had. My color files were just straight numbers, but instead of Flip Album sorting through all the color files first followed by all the B&W files in sequence, as I had expected, I got a jumbled messed of color and B&W images mixed willy-nilly on the old style number ordering sequence. Now I keep all the color files separate from the B&W files in their respective folders and create two albums. You can load as many albums as the CD can fit and having a physical separation between color and B&W seems like a good thing to me anyway. The computer used to playback the autorun CD has to be fairly recent to view the album with good speed and smoothness. The programmers really need to tweak the application and make it less of a pig to run, and especially keeping in mind the data access limitations of most optical drives. I purchased the Pro version, but unless you really need the security lock-off features available in this version, spending extra on the Pro version is unnecessary. The Standard version is a reasonable US $40 and the Suite is US $70 and has most of the features of the US $160 Pro version. Despite those caveats, and I admit they do seem lengthy, albeit mostly minor, a nicely produced Flip Album can be an effective product to use for client proofing with convenience. At this stage, I give it a qualified recommended status rather than the highly recommended for Pro Show Gold, because of the noted issues and cost of buying Pro version of Flip Album. Thankfully, you can try before you buy and see if it can work for you, but your book is limited to 50-pages in the evaluation version.
On a related topic, I was considering buying a cheap little Epson inkjet printer that can print onto blank CDs and DVDs, but my brother-in-law mentioned using Lightscribe burners and discs instead. I’ll be giving this a try with his burner to see if it’s something that can work out for creating professional looking Flip Album and slide show discs with my name and logo on it rather than “Fuji,” “Sony,” “Memorex,” “TDK,” etc. If it works out well then it saves me the hassle of buying and owning yet another printer with yet more ink cartridges to deal with. Update June 14, 2006 - My comment about not being able to change the front cover text is incorrect. You can in fact change the text to be custom instead of it defaulting to be the name of your folder of images. You can also change the cover and use one of your own images instead, which makes for a much nicer looking book when the clients first start viewing their proof CD. |
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