Posterino review

If you've ever made a photo book in iPhoto, you'll appreciate the fun that can be had from presenting photos in an attractive manner.

The stylish templates and the ease with which it's possible to insert photos into them, makes it a very appealing feature. Shame about the cost of the books, though.

Posterino doesn't help you make books of photos, but it can do almost anything else with them. Don't let the name fool you; it doesn't just do posters, it can also churn out greetings cards, postcards, and single prints very easily. What it offers is a fun way to produce photo collages and montages that have a professional finish. You could think of it as iWork for photos - indeed, many of the controls for moving, editing and collating are identical to the kind you might have used before in Pages or Keynote.

The primary editing window is your blank canvas. To the right is an iPhoto browser, allowing you to pick photos from your entire library or from just one album or roll. Create a graphic element on the canvas, and drag a photo into it. Repeat, until you have a poster or card that you like. As well as images, you can add text boxes and cute postage stamps.

A widget below the Image Picker lets you switch to controls for individual images. Here, you can add frames, shadows, and borders, as well as edit the image size.

The hand-made approach will get you exactly what you want, but don't ignore the built-in presets (very similar to templates in Pages). Here, you can instantly create a grid for 100 photos and populate it with random images from your collection. The result is a very appealing poster in about 10 seconds flat. It's similarly swift to knock out an attractive card in next to no time.

If you like the grid idea, but don't want to use 100 images, there's even a built-in layout generator, which can automate the process of creating a custom grid template. And of course, once you've created a custom design, Posterino lets you save it as a template for re-use at a later date.

By default, Posterino saves files without embedding the images; it just records pointers to the images used. Consequently each file you save is just a few kilobytes. There's no sign of bulky image files until you export the finished image as a Tiff or a Jpeg.

Exporting itself has been well thought-out too, and includes options to send your image directly to iPhoto or Mail. If you pick the latter, Posterino offers to reduce the file size to a sensible level for emailing. For best print results, of course, it's best to save as an uncompressed Tiff file, which you can then get printed in any way that's convenient. Users with access to their own high-quality printing equipment will be able to enjoy the results of their work straight away. Home users can either take the finished image to a high street print shop, or upload it to an online photo printing service.

Posterino's developer has thought of everything. This app offers new opportunities for pro and amateur photographers alike, and is well worth the price.