Marty’s Camera Bag: Lifeless Software On An Active Disk
Ever since the advent of consumer-level digital cameras, in-house photography has become more and more a part of my one-man graphic design business. In fact, at times photography has become my business. In the past, I was often searching for stock images to compliment my design work, whereas today I frequently design a project around my own photography.
Consequently, manipulating, transporting, and storing digital image files has added a new element to my day-to-day office organization. The logistics of handling numerous files becomes even more critical away from the office. When I’m out consulting with clients I never know what computers, connections, or other digital resources might be on hand for the purpose of sharing my ideas. Naturally, the promise of portable, self-contained resources is always of interest to me. With that in mind, I was anxious to check out Iomega‘s LifeWorks Photo Album.
LifeWorks Photo Album ($29.95) is the first of a new breed of software that uses Iomega’s Active Disk technology. In a way, it’s a throwback to the earliest days of personal computing, before PCs had hard drives on which to install software. Active Disk software resides entirely on a removable Zip disk (with the exception of the Active Disk driver, which must be installed on your PC only once). Pop the disk in; the software launches itself. Pop the disk out; there’s no trace of it on your PC. Nothing gets added to your directories, menus, or desktop. In the case of LifeWorks Photo Album, your images, as well as the application, remain on the Zip disk.
The idea is that Active Disk applications are truly portable. It’s possible to sit down and run your application wherever you happen to be, as long as the PC has a Zip drive and an Active Disk driver. In the case of LifeWorks Photo Album, this might mean that if you so equip the PCs of all your extended family members, you can pass your digital photo albums around at will. Maybe you could do the same with clients who need to see digital image samples of your work. Perhaps you’d even take your albums on the road with you (though this would require the unlikely presence of a Zip drive on your laptop computer).
In addition to Photo Album, Iomega also offers Intuit’s Quicken Turbo Tax on Active Disk-enabled Zip disk, and the company plans to release an additional 5 to 10 “lifestyle and personal productivity” apps this year.
Since LifeWorks Photo Album was the first Active Disk application I had used, I was required to install the Active Disk driver. After I registered the software online, the Zip disk popped out. I reinserted it and the software launched itself.
Take Two Tabs And Call Me Later
The Photo Album interface is Spartan, sporting two tabs: Print Layout and Slideshow. By default, the Print Layout tab is displayed at startup, with a scrolling thumbnail window to the left of a white rectangle that corresponds to a printed page. Initially the thumbnail boxes and the page are empty. There are five clickable icons: Add Images, Properties, E-mail, Print, and Make A New Disk. In addition, the scant menu offers access to these same functions, as well as letting you delete or rotate images, and rename the album.
Clicking on the Add Images button, I first chose to add multiple images from my hard disk. (The TWAIN driver also lets you add images from a camera or scanner.) These images are the high-res files that I sell in my graphic design business. It took just over 3 minutes to import my 125 photographic art-card images into the LifeWorks software, where the corresponding thumbnails appeared in the scrolling window.
Getting images into my photo album involved an unexpected and troubling extra step: When I chose a newly imported image and tried to print it a very distinct message in the middle of my screen corrected me: “This page is not yet part of your album and will not be printed.” Furthermore, the message instructed: “Drag an image from the thumbnail viewer to this page to automatically add it to your album.” If I have to drag each of the 125 art card images to the page myself, just how “automatic” is that?
In its default view, the thumbnail viewer displays eight images at a time. (You can select from three sizes of thumbnail to display more, or fewer, images.) Scrolling down reveals more thumbnails. Each set of eight images took 10 to 12 seconds to display, requiring over 4 minutes total to get through my album of 125 images. The thumbnail images are cached during the current session, eliminating the wait on subsequent scrolls, but nothing is written to the hard disk, so the delay will recur the next time the software is started.
Reality Bites
It appears that the software’s analogy to a real-life photo album has been carried a bit to far. I dragged the first of my selected images to the page (multiple image-dragging is not allowed, despite the ability to select multiple images), and there it sat, occupying about a fourth of the page, exactly where I dropped it. Not only does the software require you to select images one by one, but you must also manually arrange them on the page, as if actually pasting them into a ring-bound photo album! Naturally, this lets you easily misalign the images or hang them too close to — or even over — the page edge.
It is possible to resize the images to fit as many as you like on each page — an admitted improvement over the paper-based model — but this simply requires more manual tedium. With this method, it would take me hours to prepare a photo album of my wares for a client, and it would look as if it had been done by hand. What’s more, there is no provision for captioning the images. Such an album would not be of much use, even for my grandmother, let alone a client. Curiously, the Properties icon lets you assign descriptions and keywords to your images, but there is no search function to make use of the latter.
Printing album pages is as easy — and as limited — as clicking the printer icon on the Print Layout tab. No options or settings are offered beyond those provided by your printer driver. Strangely, the size of the image on the page seems to bear no relation to the image file’s size or the size of the image in other applications.
The image of Wes Bentley (above, top) is only half the physical size of the one of Tom Cavanagh. And both images are inflated beyond their intended print sizes; the 6-kb thumbnail image of Bentley occupies half of the printed page! The resulting pixelation is egregiously obvious when printed.
Slippin’ Slideshow
The slideshow function suffers from many of the same problems as the print function. Each thumbnail must be dragged and dropped individually into the presentation. There is no Select All command and multiple drag-and-drop does not work. You can place or rearrange slides into any order by dragging and dropping them. You have two choices for running the slideshow: automatic mode, with each slide advancing after ten seconds, or manually, by clicking the right- and left-arrow buttons. No other parameters may be set, such as interval or transition. All images are displayed full-screen, even my tiny 6-kb thumbnails from the Web.
A third, undocumented feature is the E-mail function. Clicking the E-mail icon launches your e-mail client — in my case, Microsoft Outlook — with your selected images already attached to a new mail message, ready to send. Curiously multiple-selection, unavailable in print or slideshow modes, is possible here. You can attach any number of selected images to your message in a single click. (The Delete function also allows multiple-selection.)
Spawning Trouble
Another feature not discussed in the skimpy instruction leaflet (the program’s help-function is Web based), is the ability to spawn new LifeWorks Zip disks. (A second, blank Zip disk is included in the package.) This is necessary, of course, because the original LifeWorks disk will soon fill up with your pictures. Strangely however, you can only copy the program files, not your photo album. So don’t expect to make copies of your handiwork for distribution. Want to give the family photos to both in-laws? Well, you’ll just have to drag and drop all over again.
The first time I clicked Make A New Disk and followed the onscreen instructions, I hit a snafu: I was asked to insert the disk I wished to “convert” into my Zip drive, which, of course, still held the Zip disk from which the program was running. The eject button on the drive did nothing, though I pushed it twice for good measure. When I clicked Cancel to abort the operation, the software shut down and the disk popped out.
Repeating the new-disk-making process I discovered that right-clicking the Zip drive’s Explorer icon and selecting Eject, did eject the disk as intended. The LifeWorks software was transferred to the newly inserted disk without further ado, but nowhere was it made clear that right-clicking was necessary to achieve my goal.
Bottom Line
Active Disk technology is clearly intended to extend the functionality of Zip drives, and make their usage more accessible to their users. However, with the rapid adoption of writable CD and DVD drives by most computer manufacturers, Iomega will need more than Active Disk to secure its place as a portable media contender in the future.
What’s more, a plethora of freeware and shareware programs is available with printing functions easily superior to those of LifeWorks Photo Album. (ACDSee 3.1, $50 from ACD Systems — comes to mind: it occupies a minimum 1.4 MB and can also be run from a Zip disk.) And the software that came with that digital camera can probably run circles around Iomega’s application as well. While the concept of a portable, easily exchangeable photo album housed in a Zip disk has merit, it seems that more thought should have been given to the software that makes it work. Furthermore, the cost of adopting Zip-drive technology for the sake of medicore image-handling software is not justified.
That said, as a current user of Zip drives, I’d be happy to use Active Disk technology if Iomega provided me with a more worthy software application. Distributing self-running presentations of my work to prospective clients would be a clear advantage.
Read more by Marty Beaudet.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on June 12, 2001
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