It can be said this is the third evolution of Clip Art. The first was bitmapped images that looked "not too horrible" when printed off your dot-matrix printer at high resolution. The second evolution included images that could be printed off your LaserWriters at a variety of resolutions and looked great albeit black and white. Now we have Photo Objects, actual color pictures and/or drawings in a variety of formats for use in printed reports, screen presentations, or for the web. The images are set on transparencies, so each have an alpha channel--more on that later. Finally, PhotoFonts provides image fills for text.

This collection of 50,176 images is wonderfully complete AND surprisingly lacking in images. The product ships on 8 CDs (or you can separately ask for all 50k images on one DVD) in a remarkably bad CD holder. As good as the product is, why they chose to contain the CDs in a collapsible cardboard CD holder that doesn't work well at all is beyond me. If you plan to use these CDs in any frequent manner, plan on adding to the price of the product something more convenient to hold the 8 CDs than what is provided.

Upon instillation (in English, French, or German) you can either choose to install all the thumbnails of each of the pictures (101 MB of data onto your hard disk) or just the basic database (29.2 MB of data). The latter requires you to insert the 1st CD whenever you do a photo search. Upon clicking on an item located on one of the other 7 CDs, you will be requested to insert that CD. If you don't plan on doing multiple search and observations, this is really not too bad. Otherwise, it's a good idea to install all the thumbnails.

The database is good and fast, even when being used off the CD. As you type, the various items are displayed on the screen below. The information on the images is broken down into which CD the image is on, the category, its name, and its description. As you type, the number of objects found changes. So, for example, as you type "cat...", there are 838 objects found. But when you type the following space for "cat," the number of objects drops considerably to 379 objects. Thus, you are not looking through caterpillar, catapult, etc.

There is an average of 8 keywords associated with each image, so your ability to focus in on a limited number of images is fairly limited by you, not the program. Also, the database is so fast you have little reason to refine and focus your objectives.

What I found interesting is how the items and categories were arranged. For example, bats were in the Halloween category, not the Animal category. Likewise, house cats were in the Pet catagory, and lions and tigers were in the Animal category. There is some logic here, but it doesn't fully grab me. Where this is important is there is a 252 page book included with the images displaying all the images in full color and organized by category. This is great unless you are looking up bats and assuming that they are not included because they are not in the Animal category section.

Once an image is found, there are three ways to get it to where you want it to be. You can either drag it directly to your document, drag it to the Finder, or go through the Hemera "Export Wizard" to help you prepare the image for its objective.

The Export Wizard guides the user through preparation for word processing, slide presentation, web authoring, graphic application, or export to a "popular image format." One of the first things you will notice as you go through the Wizard is each image is set against the checkerboard pattern demonstrating that each image is set against a backdrop of a transparency. So, if you are working with software that respects this, you can have your images separate from the alpha channel. This means that the images will not be surrounded by a rectangular border and you can get honest word-wrap around images.

However, be warned that not all programs can deal with this (the above image was done in Word 2001), and even from Photo Objects, I needed to "massage" the image in Photoshop (removing the alpha layer and channel) before I could do the above image. Their web site has a very good article on how to do this by Tom Arah. It's a pity that the information in this article isn't placed in their manual; it should be. It's also a pity that Photo Objects cannot do this automatically.

All that notwithstanding, if you are placing the image in a program that doesn't support proper wrap-around (like web browsers) Photo Objects does have a variety of ways to help "hide" the alpha channel. This is done by coloring it with just about any color you want or even repeating tiles used on web page backgrounds so that when you place it where ever it's going to be the image will be perceived as "rectangle free." This background color can also assist in any anti-aliasing.

When preparing an image for print, one can select either Screen Resolution (72 dpi); Good quality (150 dpi); High quality (200 dpi); and Professional quality (300 dpi). Images can be saved as TIFF (with transparency), JPEG (non-compressed), GIF (with transparency); Targa (with transparency); Windows Bitmapped; and MacPict amongst other formats. The file format type is set via the preference for dragged images -- the manual warns the user that any image that is copied and pasted with be limited to the PICT format (a Macintosh limitation).

Finally, Photo Objects provides PhotoFont Maker. PhotoFont Maker allows you to easily add a graphic image as the fill for text.

At any point one can change the text, the size, the style, or the fill. You are only limited by the fonts in your system, or the fills provided in the working window. And that is not much of a limitation as you can add your own fills. The "wood - Oak" fill used above was added moments before I used it. I took a photograph I had of some furniture I had made, and cropped a small section, saved as a JPEG (no compression) and added it to PhotoFonts. Since the image is copied into the program, I tossed out my original photo-snippet.

As mentioned, the selection of photos is very good AND rather disappointing. For example, there are 416 images that satisfy the keyword "dog." But relatively few breeds are actually represented. There are many photos and pictures of the same breeds (or dog toys) in different angles. (There are 5 photos of two different dog food bowls.) Likewise, they have 9 different photos of the classic little box used to take home Chinese dinners, but they are deep red in color. I have to admit that in all the years I've done Chinese takeout, I've never seen these in all red. These nine photos are useless to me.

In short, the 2nd generation of clip-art did replace the first. I don't believe anyone is using bitmapped images anymore. I'm not so sure that this generation of clip-art will replace black and white images. It will certainly add to the available possibilities. This is a good set of images, not a great set. The images are royalty free with very reasonable restrictions to their use. There is no mechanism (within Photo Objects) to compress a jpeg image, nor is there the ability to save a gif as "web," "adaptive," or "progressive." Thus, you shouldn't toss our your Photoshop, Fireworks, or comparable program just yet.

My one last beef with the program (sort of a wish-list really) is that if you double click on a given picture, bring it up front to work with and then close the database-access window, you've quit the program and the image you selected is closed as well. No warning, no nothing. Well, you've just been warned. Either way, all of my complaints are insufficient to warrant not purchasing this collection. It's not perfect, but it is good.

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