FlipAlbum 5 Pro (V. 5.5)

E-Book Systems

www.flipalbum.com

Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

FlipAlbum Pro is my favorite of the FlipAlbum products. Version 5.5 is the current release and is filled with outstanding features. I first discovered FlipAlbum several years ago. I had the standard version of version 3. Then I upgraded to version 4 and purchased the professional version after that. The professional version is, and it deserves repeating again, outstanding. I have been fortunate enough over the years to have been introduced to many great products and this certainly is one of them.

FlipAlbum is and application that creates digital photo albums. FlipAlbum albums are 3D page flipping albums. Everything about FlipAlbum makes it stand out in the crowd of photo album publishing “wannabe’s”. The pages flip just like you were turning pages in an actual album. It will even make a page turning sound if you choose to use this option! You also have the option to view the pages like a slide show. If this were all it did, it would be a useful product to have. FlipAlbum, however, goes beyond that and incorporates many more valuable features. FlipAlbum Pro takes you from album layout to preparing it for finalization on a burned CD. Not only can you share your photos but if your business requires you to submit photos or images for approval to clients (or management) this is the perfect tool for the job.

It is very easy to use and the design interface has all the tools you need available to you at a mouse click. The album design can be simple or as graphically rich as you wish. Many templates accompany the package and more are available online. For those who want to use this as a business tool, there are several commercial CD sets of themes (covers, page and book backgrounds, and separators) available. The design set CD’s sell for $99 each and have royalty free designs that will have your clients begging for more once they view one of these album designs. I saw several album themes for weddings and baby albums that I would dearly love to have in my collection. I purchased a multi-CD set last year that many theme designs, music, and PSD frames. These were purchased for my FlipAlbum 4 Pro but work with this version as well. The regular versions have non-commercial theme sets for sale on the eBooks web site. They can be purchased and downloaded individually. I hope that in the future there will be some way of purchasing commercial themes on an individual basis. They are large files and I can see the difficulty in trying to download a 50 meg or more sized file (for slower connections) but it would be nice to be able to buy them as individual purchases as well as in complete theme sets on a CD.

(This is a page example – The cat belongs to a friend who breeds them) (web site: http://www.fuzzyfuzzlet.com)

Each page in the album can be matched to a theme or enhanced with a special frame. You can also add art of your own to further enhance the pages. I included a frame that is a built in effect in the example with the cat above. (The example here has clip art added to the page theme.) There’s a large selection of artwork to use included on the theme set CD’s and available with the product itself. Choices include baby, holiday, wedding, and much more. You can also customized the album further by selecting the type of binding you want, such as spiral, three ring, or hard cover like a book. This example shows a theme with cover art and is bound like a standard book.

The album sets itself up with a thumbnail view, a contents page (s), and an index in the back. It makes accessing a particular page extremely simple. Along with this, you can add music, such as an mp3, and have the option to have it play while the album is being viewed or turned off if you don’t care to listen to it during that viewing. More than one piece of music can be used too. So many great features right at your fingertips make album designing a snap. Even an image editor is included!  What takes this application beyond the normal album products is that it is designed to showcase and protect the work of a professional designer.

For example, let’s say I am a photographer and just took photos at a wedding. My client wants to view the proofs on a CD. This could be a problem because if you give a CD of your work to someone to view what would protect your work? Sure you could watermark them. But this alone isn’t foolproof. Anyone with good software may be able to reduce or remove the watermark. And previously you needed another source to add the watermark to the image. If the client didn’t care if the images were watermarked, they would have the collection of images and could decide they didn’t want to pay you for your services. You’re out time and money; they have a CD of photos you took for them. FlipAlbum Pro has a solution for this. You can put your work into a digital album, displayed beautifully with a theme set, special frames, enhance the images with your filters, and then watermarked (or not), then you can burn a CD right from FlipAlbum Pro that offers the option to protect (encrypt) the images from being copied, set an expiration date on the CD so that after a certain date it can no longer be accessed, It can also add the watermark, password protect the CD, and you can add a print lock option to keep the images from being printed. Another feature that is terrific is that you can put multiple albums on the CD and they will appear with a screen that looks like a bookshelf displaying the available titles on the CD. This way you could offer a variety of styles if you were displaying digital photo albums to a client. All of these features work to protect your work but allow you to display your work in a professional manner. With the easy portability of a CD, you have an excellent method of submitting your work to potential clients. Clients can view and select images they want to use without your having to print hard copies to present to them. Everything can be shown through the use of the album on a CD. Web designer can take advantage of this by taking screenshots of their work and turning them into albums that feature their work or design ideas.

So many possibilities for this application come to mind when you use it. It would be a wonderful tool for a school. It could be used to create digital yearbooks, class projects, trips, or events. Memory albums of a child’s school years could be created to look like a digital scrapbook without all the hassle of buying special papers, gel pens, books, and all the other extra’s that go into scrapbooking! As a fundraiser schools or other organizations could also greatly benefit from using FlipAlbum Pro to produce specialty albums (for example a digital cookbook of favorite recipes). I believe a school would find this an excellent software application to have available for use by their creative teachers and mothers. (Academic discounts are offered by E-Book) Graphic designers could use it to display their work…..I have done this. I demonstrated how the earlier version of this product worked by putting together a set of albums on a CD showing the various designs I have created. The ways you can use this application for school, home, organizations, or businesses are endless! You can even combine it with FlipPublisher and design catalogs, brochures, etc. Is it any wonder I get overly enthusiastic about this product!

The image to the left is the interface. You can see the menu bar and the tools. Everything needed to work with the application is accessible through these toolbars. Adding images and the ability to view them as thumbnails, selecting and adding music to the album, even viewing it as a slide show with transitional effects, it’s all at your fingertips. The even an image editor built into it to help you make adjustments and changes to the images.

When the album is completed you can select the icon to begin the setup for burning the album (S) to a CD. It is here that you enter your choices for encryption for the album CD.

Feature List:

            Realistic 3-D page flipping

            Multi-page rapid flipping

            Full screen preview of an image

            Hold album pages, hold and compare contents of different album pages

            Create Album CD’s

            Multi-Album CD Maker

            Create Video CDs for Playback on DVD Players

Jump Cursor

            Quick Start Wizard * New

            Slide Show Effects

Manual Addition of Pictures

Play Video On Page

Centerfold View

Transparency Support

Picture Frame

Rename Page at Overview/Contents/Index Pages
Filename/Page Number Display

Keep Aspect Ratio when Resizing Objects

Page Indicator

Configure Left/Right/Centerfold Page Background

Hypertext and Image Links

Resizing the Pictures in your Album

Print WYSIWYG Style

Preview Images

File Information

Audio Format

JPG as Themes

Favorites

Printing to Avery Templates

Asynchronous Download of MP3 music

Image Resampling

Background Music Playlist

Add/Delete/Cut Overview/Contents/Index

            Create full-page layout with multiple images, audio, text, and multimedia.

            Add bookmarks and customize the shapes and colors of the bookmarks

            Automatic creation of thumbnail overview, table of contents, and index

            Drag and drop thumbnails, contents and index to rearrange pages quickly

            Search function, you can search for text strings and annotations on album pages

            Option to encrypt images- prevents unauthorized copying of your images

            CD password option

            Watermark option, customizable

            Print lock option

            Expiration date option

            Auto slideshow

Keep Aspect Ratio when Resizing Objects

Resize Your Book

Slide Show example: in this example the theme page is used as the background for the slideshow.

As mentioned previously, when viewing the photo album you have the option to watch it as a slide show with (or without) effects. You can also set the audio files so that they will either play while you are viewing or view with no sound. A good sized album can have several mp3 files added to it to enhance the viewing pleasure.

Index & Table of Contents View 

Book Options View

 Book Options

FlipAlbum Professional is a product with so much potential that once you start using it, you can’t help but think how many others would benefit from using this application. Share the information, please! This is how we learn and help others.  I mentioned several that I think would surely gain from using it. Each of the versions that are available offers something of value to the user. Whether you want to create personal albums to display your photos with style and a variety of fantastic features or use it in a business venture, you will find it is an excellent investment and it will surely please you with all that it has to offer. It has worked very well for me and I do recommend to anyone who is working with digital images.