Ashampoo Photo Commander 7 7.21

Are you in need of sorting, optimizing, editing, or managing your pictures, music, or movie files? Beside being a useful image editor, 'Ashampoo Photo Commander 5' plays multimedia content such as audio (includes ID3 tag reader) and video files, allowing you to manage playlists.

Immediately after installation, the program asks you whether you want to associate all the image file types to it. You can choose to run the application in easy mode - with basic features or in expert mode - for advanced users. You can reside, flip, or rotate your images, or even create photo albums and publish them on the Internet or send them to your friends. You can also create animated images, apply borders, take snapshots of your computer screen, and use conversion functions.

While testing the program, I've discovered that if the preview of a photo fits the preview area you can surf back and forward between the pictures in the current folder by rotating the scroll wheel. At first, I was impressed by this feature. However, I discovered soon that when I open a picture, which doesn't fit the preview area, the scroll wheel feature is disabled. The scroll wheel only moves the selected picture inside the preview area.

Another interesting feature is the 'Capture Mode'. You can capture windows or just parts of the screen and you can take multiple captures at a time (one by one). The captured images can be modified later in the built-in image editor. Before capturing the screen, you can set some options including the color of the applied shadows or the shape of the captured images. These shapes can be rectangles, ellipses, auto shapes, etc.

Pluses: You can burn your images directly to a CD or DVD as an animated slide show or upload them to your homepage as an interactive photo album. Thanks to the plugins, you can acquire images from multiple sources and print them afterwards.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: Compact, well designed, with a fully customizable GUI, integrating photo editing, video, and audio file management, Ashampoo Photo Commander is a powerful and easy-to-use tool. I enjoyed working with this software.

version reviewed: 5.10