Cyberlink MediaShow 4 review

If you have a large collection of digital photos and videos, you may find it hard to keep them organised and to find what you want.

CyberLink's MediaShow 4 aims to make your life easier by providing a single interface for viewing and editing photos and videos.

Once the initial indexing is done, the main interface appears. On the left is a list of folders containing your photos, organised according to the year they were taken. If you've taken the time to tag your photos, you can search by these, too.

Resizable thumbnails appear in the middle of the screen, and you can drag them into the Tray on the right to add to an album, view in a slideshow or include on a DVD. Buttons along the top enable you to rotate images, batch edit them and mark favourites.

The Create menu has options for making a screensaver of your photos, creating a video slideshow, burning images to a DVD or printing them locally. The Order Prints button didn't work in our test version. The Share menu lets you email images (which the software resizes automatically) or upload them to Flickr.

Editing is non-destructive, so it doesn't affect the original photos on your hard disk. It's simple to crop, remove red eye and add effects such as soft focus or colour tints. As well as the usual motion and fade effects in slideshows, there's a stylish Cell option that shows several images at once and can synchronise with background music.

The interface works in a similar way with video, but adds options to fix lighting, background noise and shaky camerawork, and trim clips. You can then upload your video directly to YouTube.

We like MediaShow 4's ease of use, but it's practically identical to Google's free Picasa 2. MediaShow's only real advantage is the ability to edit and upload videos, but this is just as easy with other free tools such as Roxio Buzz. If it weren't for these free alternatives, MediaShow 4 would be relatively good value.