Cyberlink MediaShow 4 review

MediaShow handles a range of photo-related tasks, including uploading from the camera, organising, editing and sharing images.

It made a great first impression, starting with a collage from our photo library in its opening screen and following up with a slick animated interface, which resembles Picasa’s.

MediaShow trumps Picasa in its slideshow creation. Select a folder or a collection of photos, hit the Slideshow button and photos appear, complete with musical accompaniment, transitions and classy pan-and-zoom animations. Another slideshow theme simply fades between photos, while a third uses split-screens and dramatic animations that move in time with the music. Dramatic templates often look pretty cheesy, but this one is genuinely impressive.

A Create tab includes options to use photos as Windows wallpaper or screensavers. You can also make prints or save slideshows as a DVD Video disc or WMV file. DVDs and WMVs include the three slideshow themes mentioned above, and DVDs can include video files as well as slideshows. There’s no facility to include more than one slideshow on a disc, but you can get round this by exporting slideshows as individual WMV video files and re-importing them all to a single DVD. WMV export supports resolutions up to 1,280×720, which is ideal for onscreen viewing or uploading to YouTube at its highest quality setting. However, for online sharing, it makes more sense to upload photos as JPEGs rather than video. Fortunately, MediaShow has this covered, as it can connect directly to Flickr. This bypasses MediaShow’s slideshow animation tools, but Flickr is reasonably well equipped here.

For straightforward editing, sorting and online sharing, we’d stick with Picasa, but the DVD authoring on offer justifies the price.