Corel Snapfire photo software

Corel have launched a new photo organizing and editing package called Snapfire. Available in two versions, a free one, and Snapfire Plus with additional features, it appears to share many of the features of Picasa, namely importing photos direct from your camera, offering simple editing, sharing by email and slide show, and backing up to CD or DVD.

The About Box credits around 75 people, so this seems to have been a sizable development effort -though it may be that many of those just worked on bits that have been bolted into the program.  Having a look at the files on disk shows a good number of bits that may have come from other Corel packages - after all Corel are the current home for Paint Shop Pro, and they already have a photo organizer called Corel Photo Album.

The file formats supported look to be jpeg, gif, tiff, png, bmp, plus avi, mov, and mpeg for videos.  No sign of RAW file support, which suggest this is aimed at the casual user (the "snapper"), not the enthusiastic photographer.

First impressions show it to be inferior to Picasa in every aspect I cared about, so for me at least, it was quickly uninstalled. It's unclear how Corel is going to find space in the market for this - especially since to come close to match Picasa's features you really need the paid for version.

ABC News has a review, where they are slightly more positive in that the reviewer mostly found it enjoyable to use - but they also conclude that Picasa beats it in all respects at the moment.

Update: In the brief period that Snapfire was installed on my machine, I find that it did something very stupid - it ran through the whole of my Outlook emails, extracting every image it could find into a directory hierarchy within the My Pictures folder on my disk.  Why is this stupid, well many reasons:

• it extracted every image, including the thousands of ones from junk emails that are currently in my junk emails or my deleted folders
• I don't want yet another copy of all the images in my good emails either - any that I want to refer to have already been extracted to disk, so this is simply polluting my disk with lots of duplicates
• I certainly don't want things added in the My Pictures folder - which I never use since its on a disk drive where space is at a premium

You may ask how did I spot this - simple, after uninstalling Snapfire, I started up Picasa again, and it suddenly found thousands of images that had not been present on my machine beforehand.