HANDS-ON BY GREG SCOBLETE
Few photographers need to be
reminded of the old truism that “time
is money.” Fundy Designer was built
with this ethos in mind. It’s an album-building
tool that enables you to quickly assemble
your own print album rather than pay a third
party to do it for you. After version 7 was
announced at WPPI, we were able to put the
program through its paces. Fundy Designer is
available for both Mac and Windows
operating systems for $299 for new users and
for $199 for anyone upgrading from an older
version of the software.
WHAT’S NEW
There are plenty of changes in v7, so it
makes sense to reaffirm what hasn’t changed:
Fundy Designer is still centered on template-
free album building. While it’s faithful to this
mission, Version 7 represents a substantial
update. The user interface (UI) has been
redesigned. The pale gray background has
been replaced with clean white. Images
and tools once arrayed along the left rail
are now laid out on the bottom or top of
the program, freeing up space to view your
album pages more organically. Access
to albums, wall gallery designs and blog
collages are all available now in the main
interface.
Image browsing and organizing within the
program have also been upgraded. There’s
now a full-blown image browser where you
can organize images, add tags and stars,
and sort through your imported images.
Fundy Designer can now read star tags and
keywords from programs like Lightroom or
Photo Mechanic. Outside of three Fundy-
specific image tags, you can also add
keywords and stars to images in Fundy and
have that data travel back with the images
into Lightroom or Photo Mechanic.
USER FRIENDLINESS
If you’ve never used older versions
of Fundy—heck, if you’ve never used any
album-building software before—it won’t take
you very long at all to get up to speed with
Designer v7. Every album starts by choosing
whether you want to design an album for
output at a specific lab (Fundy stores specs
on thousands of album styles from over 110
U.S.-based labs) or create a custom album
that doesn’t necessarily conform to any one
lab’s requirements. Once you’ve made that
choice, you import a batch of JPEG images
and begin the design process.
There are other software titles that can
compile images into albums, but Fundy’s
ABOVE: Version 7 features a revamped
interface and better organizing tools, such as
the ability to rate and tag images.
SOFTWARE REVIEW
FAST FORWARD WITH FUNDY
With a new user interface and organizing tools, is Fundy Designer v7
the album builder you’ve been waiting for?
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