BookSmart

If you don't want to dump photos of important moments on a CD and forget it in a corner, you could arrange them in a printable album. BookSmart can help you create such an album. It places numerous editing and customization tools at your disposal. The operation is easy, from start to finish, due to the software's intuitive design.

BookSmart is offered as a free software, for Windows and Mac OS X. Downloading and installing the program should not take more than a minute and there are no complex configurations to make during the setup process. The hardware requirements are modest and there is no need to install any prerequisite tools.

Essentially, creating a photo book involves dragging and dropping pictures over blank image boxes, but you can do much more besides that. The software comes with a wide variety of templates for book formats and page layouts. You can choose from larger or smaller books and from various page layouts, with more images, text or both.

Images can be loaded from local folders, but you can also import them from online sources, like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or SmugMug. Mastering the main user interface and its controls is quite easy. Imported pictures are displayed on the left side of the window, where you can also select and apply different page layouts. Besides dropping your photos in the appropriate boxes, you can also type or paste text, if you want to add descriptions.

The software allows you to customize your own layout. You can either create a new layout from scratch or modify existing ones according to your specific needs. Each text or image box can be moved and resized however you want, by clicking and dragging.