-::: INTRO:::-

If you're anything like me, your photo collection is well into the thousands. In fact, in the summer of 2004 I took 743 photos! In MDIS, you can change the size of the thumbnails simply by using the slider bar, so if a folder has several hundred photos, you can adjust the slider to view all the thumbnails without having to scroll through several pages. Then when you hover over a thumbnail you get a nice big hover window that shows you more detail of that photo.

I have now tagged up all my thousands of photos (this does take a lot of patience, however, it's not as big a job as you'd think, because MDIS makes it so easy for you!) and I love it. Select as many or as few tags as you want to filter the photos that will appear in your results. I've taken hundreds of pictures of my dog over the years, the problem before was that they were in at least 10 different folders amongst hundreds of photos, finding just the pictures of my dog would have been a nightmare, but not anymore - my black beauty is now just one click away! You can also flag the pictures you want to print out, or give your photos a star rating, so you can just select the best to show your friends.

MDIS is a very powerful photo editor with lots of options, many of which the average user (like me) will never use. Most people I imagine would use the auto fixes, which produce extremely good results. Color (American), Exposure, Contrast and Levels all have auto fixes, where MDIS analyses the photo and works out what changes would make it look better. I've included a before and after photo at the bottom to show how good it is at changing the photos automatically. You also have full control over these functions if you wanted to manually change them.

The one thing I was most looking forward to was the panoramic stitching. Me and Nathan had taken a lot of photos that needed this stitching. It's simplicity itself: select all the photos required for the panorama - depending on how many you have selected, this process can take a long time. The first one I did was made up of 14 photos and it took about 20 minutes to stitch together, but the result was amazing! It blends the edge of each photo and matches up the images EXACTLY! I've studied some of the pictures long and hard, and cannot believe how perfect they are. This feature alone is worth the price of the software. Check out a picture of Red Square - Moscow (http://www.hebawom.toucansurf.com/Red%20Square%202.jpg)

This is a great program. It lets you select a group of photos that you want to show to people, and takes you through the creation process of making your own movie out of the photos. You start by deciding how each photo will be displayed; it can pan across the photo or zoom in or zoom out. It then lets you decide how the transitions between each photo will look. However, leaving it on automatic is fine since it does a great job. You can then add captions, and select a music track or multiple tracks. And finally it asks you to add an audio commentary. It then outputs it to a video file. Its great for mobile devices and DVD players.