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	Image Is Everywhere
By J. R. Wilson

Let us first accept that we now live in a digital world. Kodak, Fuji, Polaroid, Agfa—they all make digital cameras now (along with at least a couple of dozen others). Even people who still use standard film eventually have the images digitized.

Which makes perfect sense. When a new baby entered our family recently, the proud parents and grandparents immediately e-mailed pictures of baby Chloe to one and all—and Grandma set up a Web site for more.

Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, vacations, new house, new car (or trying to sell the old one), new boat, new RV, dogs, cats, horses, turtles, lizards—whatever it is you want to immortalize and share, the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to do it is digital.

With cheap and powerful computers and components—and just about everyone online—you can share those images in e-mails, on Web sites or by burning a CD or DVD.

And let us not forget the explosion of family history sites, where all these new photos and scanned ones from yesteryear will become the family albums of the present and future.

Software to Help You Digitize

But just putting up a digital picture seems kind of dull in this age of computer wizardry. After all, given what computers can and have and will do for movies and TV, why should your favorite shots be relegated to stale-old-static status?

Which brings us to the software at hand. The program featured in this column is one of the best programs of any kind I have seen to date. It offers more than you expect, comes with an excellent tutorial and demonstration CD, gives you free weekly downloads of new presentation styles, provides multiple ways to share your newly created masterpieces easily, and is amazingly simple to use.

3D-Album from Micro Research Institute ($39.95, http://www.3d-album.com/) can turn even the most mundane photos of the dullest person into an exciting multimedia experience. So you can only imagine what it will do for the high-flying record of your action-packed life.

The best thing about this program is it does 99 percent of the work for you—which, frankly, is what a computer is supposed to do, but rarely accomplishes. All you do is put your digitized pictures in a folder on your hard drive, then point the program to that folder. After that, you just pick and choose from drop-down menus.

The program comes with about two dozen built-in presentation styles, but new ones are available from the company’s Web site nearly every week. And when I say presentation styles, I’m talking about some truly eye-popping ways of displaying a single photo or an entire album. These are animated displays that fly your pictures through space, put them on giant balloons, hang them in fancy art galleries or turn them into Christmas tree ornaments or Valentines, just for starters.

The display you build can contain not only still images (JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP), but also sound (MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, RIFF, AIF, RMI) and movies (AVI, MPEG, MPEG2, WM, QuickTime). That means you can add background music, voiceovers, or just about anything. You also can change colors and display speeds, and even place your selected style inside a “skin,” such as a golden locket or antique frame.

Endless Possibilities

Once you’ve created a presentation you like, you click the Build button and are offered a choice of creating a stand-alone desktop application, a screen saver, HTML pages, Zip files or a self-expandable .exe file (which incorporates the Visviva viewer). You can share your creation with others by e-mail, through a Web site or by burning it onto a CD or DVD. A file without the viewer is considerably smaller—and your recipients can download their own free viewer from the 3D-Album Web site.

Just what you see when you complete an album style is difficult to explain. Your best bet is to watch the demos at the Web site, which will demonstrate some of the following possibilities.

Photo Display—Photos are set onto semi-transparent hanging tapestries that wave in a light breeze and reflect off a white marble floor. A new photo is added each time the tapestries rotate.

Tunnel—As you “fly” through a tunnel, each photo appears as a single frame that sinks down to reveal the next photo.

Balloon—Your photos are displayed one by one on the side of a rotating hot-air balloon as it gently floats over continuously scrolling mountains, with realistic drifting clouds and breeze animation.

Photo Cube—Your images are shown on the outside or inside (your choice) of an animated 3-D cube.

Oval Frame—A spinning frame reveals a new photo each time it rotates.

Photo Clock—Photos appear as the inside face of a working animated clock (it even tells accurate time). Each new photo loads with a “sweep” transition animation. This one is recommended as a screensaver.

Photo Storm—Each image in a montage enlarges from small to super-size in a series that moves toward you on the screen.

Picture Rack—Four images at a time are displayed on a rotating 3-D picture rack, with new photos loaded on the backside of the rack in each rotation.

Semi-Transparent—A series of semi-transparent photos rotate on an endlessly changing axis.

Some of the presentation formats also are designed for business use. And all are capable of accepting an unlimited number of images.

All this alone would make 3D-Album more than worth its modest price, even without the free downloads of new styles and skins, a demonstration and tutorial disc that should be mandatory for every piece of consumer software and, just in case, the ability to convert the whole thing, at the click of a button, to your choice of language (Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish).

Bottom line: It is not possible to recommend this program too highly. It does more, better, for less money than anything I’ve ever seen on a computer. Toss in easy and fun, and what more could you ask?