Serif MediaPlus 2 review

MediaPlus 2, Serif's latest image organiser, is pleasingly straightforward.

The left half of the screen displays all your files and folders, allowing you to browse for images. The right half shows your 'albums': images that MediaPlus decides, according to criteria you determine, belong together. The program doesn't actually move these files from where you've saved them, it just displays them in your album as a group of thumbnail photos. When you click on one of the thumbnails, the file opens from its actual location. You can create any number of albums.

As well as sorting pictures by name, size, date and so on, you can do a search to make a new album of images that match criteria such as file name, format, date range or resolution. It would have been good to have other ways to organise pictures too: you can't sort them into categories, for example. Annoyingly, the program also failed to read some TIFF files.

Professional picture libraries assign 'keywords' to each of their images, enabling you to find, say, every picture that contains a sunset. In MediaPlus, you can type keywords into any image's Properties, and use them as search criteria. Since there are no predefined keywords, or any help setting up a meaningful system, you'll have to invent them all yourself - a laborious task if you have thousands of photos.

The Download tab harvests images from Web sites. You enter a URL and search criteria, then the software trawls through the site fetching all the relevant images. Nice idea, but you're letting yourself in for an unknown amount of waiting and disk usage - and besides, you're unlikely to have copyright clearance anyway.

Batch Conversion lets you rename, resize or reformat a group of images, with a very wide range of options available. You can also encrypt pictures in a file containing a dummy image, although password-protecting albums would have been more useful.

You can make a set of images into an instant Web gallery or email them to your friends. You can also make a slideshow with transition effects, and save it as an .exe file or export it to Video CD Maker, which is included. This stores a sequence of images on a CD-R in VCD format, which can be played in most DVD players. You'll need a CD burner for this.

MediaPlus 2 has some good features, but unless you need to create VideoCD slideshows, it's pricey - our Best Buy image organiser, iView Media, costs just £20. For more organising and editing options, Adobe Photoshop Album 2 costs around £40.