Review: iScrapbook
- Article 50 of 89
- MacFormat, July 2007
It might not be the best scrapbook, but it’s great as a photo album maker
What’s a scrapbook for? Plenty of things, right? Photos, bits of paper, flowers, recipes: anything you want to collect. Clearly Chronos, the creators of iScrapbook, have a completely different definition of a scrapbook in mind, one that is almost identical to the one most people use for “photo album”.
iScrapbook bears more than a passing resemblance to iPhoto’s photo album creation service but goes beyond it in many ways. You start off by creating an album, then slowly build up pages inside the album using the various template pages that come with the program or that you’ve downloaded from the iScrapbook community at www.iscrapbookworld.com (although at the time of writing, there were none available). Each template contains photo frames to which you can add photos from your iPhoto library using the built-in browser or via drag and drop from the Finder. Then you can modify the photos with iScrapbook’s “Smart Inspector”, using sliders to control brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and more.
You can add extra photos to your pages using the pre-supplied set of frames, place them, rotate them, change their borders, add drop shadows, and make them as transparent as you like. You can also apply one or more of the 30 or so supplied effects to the photos, adding vignettes, sepias, spot photos et al. You can always go back to and amend these effects if you change your mind. You can also add text and extra graphic shapes such as squares, triangles, stars and arrows; apply colour gradients to objects; change the colour of the pages; and add different corners to the photos. iScrapbook also comes with the SOHO Art Pack, a collection of 40,000 photos, photo objects, and vector clip art graphics, in case you need something a little extra for your templates.
To make sure everything’s pretty, there’s a whole range of layout tools for aligning and distributing things, placing objects in precise positions, measuring, gridding up your design, locking objects in place, grouping them, and changing their positions relative to one another in the current layer. Indeed, iScrapbook actually has layers like a professional DTP program, so you can rearrange objects on layers, create new layers from selections, and merge layers together. It took QuarkXPress four versions and over a decade before it did the same, so Chronos should be proud of itself. If you’re particularly impressed – with your own page design – and you might well be with all those tools to help you create a masterpiece – you can upload it and share it with others at iScrapbookworld.
Once you’ve finished your scrapbook, you can print it, or convert it to image files or a PDF that you can give to others. You should be able to send it to an online printer as well, although Chronos’ list of online printers is as empty as iScrapbookworld; you’re free to find one for yourself and send them your album as a PDF, complete with crop marks, etc, thanks to the extensive print preferences available in iScrapbook.
It’s here though that Chronos has missed the big trick. PDFs are more than capable of storing annotations, videos, sound and other files, so given that the program is supposed to be a scrapbook generator, this would have been a good way to create a genuine iScrapbook that you could share with others. As it is, you’re already lured into thinking that you can use movies in your scrapbook, since the iPhoto browser displays any movies you might have stored in your iPhoto library. You can’t do anything with them though, not even drag them, leading to a few frustrating moments when you first try.
As an alternative to iPhoto for creating photo albums, iScrapbook isn’t quite there yet. Without the fully automated online album creation service of Apple’s product, iScrapbook is a difficult method for creating an actual photo album although it’s certainly fine at creating basic albums if you have a good enough inkjet printer and can find yourself a binding service. The program’s inability to store anything except images certainly limits its use as a scrapbook. And the integration with iPhoto, while better than nothing, could have been improved by the ability to import iPhoto albums, for example. Nevertheless, it is extremely impressive as a way to create digital photo albums.