The product comes on four CD’s and a full install (using discs 1 – 3) is said to need 1700MB of space. I found it took 1755MB for me and took a whopping 20 minutes to install on a reasonably fast PC. The forth CD contains over 600MB worth of graphics and fonts.

When run the opening screen has four options, Tutorial, Help, Open or Close these options are superimposed on the work area and also offer the chance to delve into twelve Project headings.

Scrapbooks is the first and there are 19 categories and each has a number of sub categories for instance Holidays has 15 sub categories however this is not the norm as some only have one or two. The full list of categories are, Arts & Entertainment, Business, Education & Schools, Events & Occasions, Family & Friends, Food & Drink, Hobbies & Interests, Holidays & Seasons, House & Home, Just for Kids, Military, Name Pages, Outdoor Recreation, Pets and Animals, Religious Celebrations, Remembrances, Sports & Fitness, Traditional 12x12, Travel & Leisure and just for good measure for that item or items that demands it’s own Scrapbook _Blanks.

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Having selected a category or opened a stated book you get to the main interface and while it is fairly straightforward a run through the tutorial may make doing a certain job a lot more straightforward than trial and error.

Assuming you decide a blank or perhaps no template at all the centre of the screen is a blank page the left side has five icons that say Add Items, Text Tools, Drawing Tools, Editing Tools and Web Resources. By default the right side has Three Tabs, Scraps, Text and Colours. The open tab is scraps and here there are over 40 items under the first heading Accents A-B and there are no less than 92 of these headings.

The top of the screen has standard Windows drop down menus File, Edit, View, Insert, Arrange, Object and Help. Below this there are 22 icons and dependant on what you are doing and where you are some are greyed out. The product also comes with quite a decent 160 page manual, and today paper manuals are rare.

That is a whistle stop tour of the interface. While most items in any scrapbook are going to be photographs there are going to be cuttings from newspapers and maybe magazines and these would need to be scanned to be saved. Of course some items are not translatable such as Susie’s first tooth and those will continue to need hard storage somewhere.

However the idea is sound just having a repository for old images does not make them easy to find. Having them stored in categories makes things a little easier and once they are there producing a copy only requires a little work and a decent inkjet printer to reproduce the item and not just the photo itself but perhaps the story to go with it. So not just when Steven won the 50metre swimming race but the date and the time, these things tend to get lost in the ether over the years.

Any tool such as Scrapbook Factory Deluxe will help, but remember while there is an advantage to having all your images in one place, there is also a danger should the PC crash – unless you have a backup – or there is a fire or robbery.

Available from dealers or direct from Avanquest at around £29.95

http://www.shop.avanquest.com/uk/prod.php?pid=1162