Digital cameras were supposed to put an end to those boxes full of negatives stuck under the bed. But without some software to organise things, it can be just as hard to keep track of digital pictures on a computer.

Serif's MediaPlus 2 will help you get your photo collection in order. The first thing to do, after a simple installation process, is sort your pictures into albums. Once that's done, comments and keywords can be added to albums or individual pictures. These can then be searched, so you can look for all pictures of pets taken in 2003, for example. Doing all the organising is a fair bit of work to begin with, but if it's done every time you copy a new batch of photos from the camera, it becomes easier.

MediaPlus can make screen savers of treasured images and, if you use a shared computer, it enables you to encrypt pictures (hiding one image so it looks like another). There's also a batch-processing tool for changing the variables of a large number of photos at once - file format and image size, for example. Other functions, such as setting images as the Desktop background and emailing pictures, can be done without MediaPlus but it's useful to have them all in one place.

An interesting addition is the 'internet downloading' feature. With this, you can tell MediaPlus 2 to grab all the pictures from a specific website.

It has some powerful filtering options, so you can ask it to only pick files of a certain size. We thought this might be useful for trawling a football club's site, for example, for big pictures that can be made into a personalised screen saver.

You can create online photo albums that can be accessed via the internet, or generate slideshow presentations that can be viewed by people who don't have MediaPlus. Using the Video CD Maker, included on the second CD, albums can be made into a Video CD, which can then be played on most DVD players.

Although it's billed as 'media management', MediaPlus has very little to offer with regards to your MP3 collection, concentrating mainly on pictures. On the whole, it is a useful application, but the alternatives, although they have fewer features, offer better value.

Contact: Serif 0845 345 6770
www.serif.com