Light Crafts Aurora Digital Photo Software

Light Crafts Aurora is a very simple digital photo organizer and editor for Windows and Macintosh. Aurora offers a visual editor which greatly simplifies photo adjustments, and integrates with several online photo-sharing and social-networking services. In addition, Aurora allows you to organize, annotate, tag, rate, and search your photos. An optional online backup service is also available for an additional monthly fee. But even if Aurora were free, I couldn't recommend it - there are just too many better options available at little or no cost.

Pros:

• Visual photo editor greatly simplifies image adjustments.
• Compatible with Windows and Mac.
• Connects with many photo-sharing and social-networking services.

Cons:

• Slow, resource intensive, and prone to crashes and freezing.
• Limited features and options.
• Only works with JPEG files.
• Automatic red eye fix didn't always work, and there is no manual option.

Description:

• Aurora helps you organize, improve, and share your digital photos.

• Organize with star ratings, titles, descriptions, keyword tags.

• View pictures as thumbnails, a film strip, slide show, or full size.

• Improvements include relight, crispness, punch, color strength, color warmth, black & white, tint, red eye, retouch, crop & straighten.

• Share and publish through Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly, Picasa, SmugMug, or twentythree.

• Provides very basic printing and email functions.

• Backup photos online (requires an account with Amazon.com for a monthly fee).

Aurora automatically indexes your pictures folder and builds thumbnails for your photos. If your photos are stored in a location other than the system pictures folder, you can point Aurora to another folder on your system. Unfortunately, the indexing process is incredibly slow, and the slowness persists every time the program is launched. Changing folders and browsing photos is a perpetual waiting game.

The main features that stand out about Aurora are the visual photo editing and the online integration with photo-sharing and social-networking services, so I'll keep this review focused on those aspects of the software.

Visual Editing

Photo editing is done through a series of previews which pop up to show varying degrees of adjustment for each improvement. Simply click the preview you like best to apply the adjustment. This isn't new to photo editors, but Aurora has done it in a very intuitive and unintimidating way. Unfortunately, the available adjustments are all fairly basic and don't go beyond what you can do with other free software.

In many cases, the edits accentuated the noise in my low-lighting pictures, making them look worse. The red-eye tool was very hit-and-miss for the photos I tested, and there is no manual method for correcting the red eye it does not detect. The only pixel-level adjustment offered is a retouch tool which does blended cloning, but is too limited to be of much use.

Online Integration

Aurora also claims to "directly connect" with photos in your online accounts. After the often-convoluted process of connecting to your online accounts, the program proceeds to download photos from all your online accounts, most likely creating duplicates on your hard drive. There is no way to choose specific albums to work with, so it wastes a lot of time, bandwidth, and disk space copying everything.

I tested Aurora's integration with Facebook and PicasaWeb and was less than impressed. Aurora automatically uploaded my edits back to Facebook, but the edited photo was added to my album instead of replacing the original. It also damaged the people tags to where they no longer corresponded with the faces in my pictures, and it automatically posted an ad for itself on my friends' feed. Aurora worked better with PicasaWeb, but it added a caption "Uploaded with Aurora" to the edited photos.

Conclusion

In other areas, Aurora offered nothing to compete with other free digital photo software such as Picasa, FastStone, or Windows Live Photo Gallery. When you also factor in the slowness and frequent crashes, I can't recommend it.