Multimedia Corner

Super Stock and It's not a Car: Corel Photo Stock

Having an unlimited stock of royalty free photographs is the multimedia developer's ultimate dream. The Corel Stock Photo boxed-set Photo CD fantasy is really two libraries, each with 200 CD-ROM disks containing 20,000 professional quality photographs. Using the package's built-in tools you can easily locate, convert, and copy photo still art for incorporation into a multimedia project. The dual Macintosh and Windows PC product has a license of use that allows almost any use of the material.

The collections come with a manual index and a thumbnail image disk that display all the artwork. The thumbnail disk is also available separately ($30) as a preview disk for the $995 full package. The electronic indexing system on the CD-ROMs allows you to search up to four key words. The utility will display the image name, series number, image number, and the thumbnail.

The photo libraries contain Corel's Photo CD Lab and Corel ArtView Screen Saver software. The Photo Lab supports five screen resolutions up to 2048 x 3072, and file support includes GIF files. Each disk also includes CD Audio (not on Macintosh version), Corel Mosaic Visual File Manager, Wallpaper, and Wallpaper Flipper Utilities. Using the software artwork can be produced in TIF, BMP, EPS, GIF, and PCX files for Windows systems. The Macintosh software exports PICT and TIFF.

The libraries are packaged in a single round storage case filed in alphabetical order. The titles on Library 1 include Action Sailing, Bald Eagles, France, Helicopters, Insects, Monaco, New York City, Owls, Soldiers, Waterfalls, Yosemite, and eighty-nine other discs. Library 2 includes African Birds, Bark Textures, Castles, Dog Sledding, Ireland, Kenya, Namibia, Space, Theater, Tall Ships, the Virgin Islands, Zion National Park, and eighty-eight other discs.

A Corel Stock Photo Library requires a Windows compatible PC with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, DOS 3.1 or later, MSCDEX 2.0 or later, 2 Mb of RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. No XA CD-ROM support is needed. For a Macintosh, the computer must be System 7 compatible, have 4 Mb of available RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. Each image is about 18 Mb uncompressed with full color functionality for grayscale, 16 or 256 color imaging, and 24-bit RGB capability. The photographs are in Kodak Photo CD format.

If the full Library packages are too much for the project on which you are working, Corel offers two additional ways to purchase the photo discs. The themed Volume Sets include 25 CD-ROMs with 2,500 photos, a storage case, and a large printed coffee-table preview book. The 400 individual discs are also available in standard CD-ROM jewel cases with printed thumbnail on a foldout catalog sheet.

The offerings include both portrait and landscape proportioned images so you can work them into most projects. The thumbnail images do not, however, always let you make the final decision on the right image. Many images in a series, like the Space series, look similar in the small format, but very different at full resolution. The system's viewer does allow you to page through all art on a disc at full resolution, but it does not offer a select first, view later option. Sometimes you are faced with a choice of either hand loading a list of images you have located on the thumbnails, or spend hours paging through the whole disc.

Contributed by C. W. Mann, who also writes the syndicated computer column, BuzzBytes.

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