I've reviewed an awful lot of digital photo album type software but I've never found one quite as easy to use as this little gem from the Pearl Mountain people.

I loaded up the software, registered and started a new project very simply and quickly, always a good start I say.

The user interface was a little different to most but the mneumonics were all in place to help me with my learning curve. A couple of trial clicks and drags and I was on my merry way to creating a collage of images for a calendar. The calendar in the screen shot below took about 10 minutes to make and could be saved in a variety of sizes to suit most screen resolutions. What was particularly nifty about it was that I used one of the standard templates that came with the software and was able to click and drag images and deposit them nicely into the little frames. It was easy to crop the images so that they were the right size (only needed if they were different dimensions to the frame) and also to copy the frame itself, resize and drop other images inside. The software took care of the calendar part and the whole thing was customisable right down to font size, name and colour. Impressive.

    

The software is aimed at the novice user but that doesn't make it less sophisticated. As well as calendars you can create collages and there are loads of "masks" in the inbuilt library to apply to the images. Take a look at the image next to the calendar above and you can see a variety of mask shapes applied to the collage. And, next to that is an image of a finished wallpaper with masks applied.

As well as templates, frames and masks you'll also find a load of effects, clipart and backgrounds in the library. From which you'll be able to make wallpaper for your PC, calendars and greeting cards. You can personalise your photos with text, resize them and save them out of the program to a variety of file formats.

This software is slick, sophisticated and so easy to use a child could do it. It comes in at a great price too ... at around $32.00 AUD for a single license or around $100.00 AUD for a Site license. Take a wander over to the Pearl Mountain site and look over some of the samples.

Overall, I have to give this software a double thumbs up, it's the Bees Knees.