Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9

To evaluate Microsoft Digital Image Suite 9, you need to separate the product into two parts. One being the photo library program, which helps you organize your photos. The other being the editing feature.

In regards to the first part is the Microsoft Digital Image Library. Basically, it's a super-charged Microsoft Explorer for photos. The explorer has a number of features that makes life a LOT easier. I'll highlight some of my favorites below.

For one it does autoscan, which most programs do, except that it breaks them down into categories. While I sorted all of my pictures by date, it automatically did this regardless of the directory I put them in. You could even sort it by event and it would "assume" which event was which, based on clusters of pictures taken at a certain time.

The other major timesaver is that it allows you to sort by keyword. You can now add certain keywords to photos so you can categorized all of your photos by subject, such as "family" versus "work." This saves a lot of time when you have 10K+ photos such as myself.

The best feature has to be the archiving feature that determines what you've archived already, what is left to archive and what you've edited. The backup feature alone is what makes this worth it for me.

But then, this program directly interacts with Part two, which is the Digital Image Pro. From the explorer-like interface of the Digital Image Library, you can click on a photo and instantly open the photo interface.

Yes, it's advanced. It's very advanced, but fortunately it has three auto features that within minutes I was living on: auto-levels, auto-contrast and red-eye. Within 20 seconds, I fixed and improved 90% of my shots. It's literally a matter of clicking a button and all is well.

As for the other features, you can do the standard lightening, darkening, cropping, and go much further in-depth than I, as an average user, even understood at the time. The benefit was that I could use it for the basic stuff and if I wanted to try something advanced, I could use that too.

Yes, there are MANY other features, but in the interest of time, I just listed my favorites. There are 1,000s of backgrounds, and filters and blending brushes, etc. Overall, my answer is this is one of the first graphics programs I saw that was equally as good for the advanced user as for the novice. I really don't understand much about graphic editing, but within a few hours I was really starting to get the hang of it; from basic to advanced.