Customer Rating:  
Summary: I'm very happy with this product
Comment: Just to let you know, I think this is an expansion upon the 100,000 Hermera photo images collection for Mac. It has all the same artwork plus 50,000 more. The duplicate artwork is in higher resolution however, so that's a plus. You see I have the 100,000 collection as well, but I'm still glad I bought this one.
Some artwork on here is 1,000 x 1,000, so that's pretty big for casual use. I use it for website graphics so the "high-resolution" question for commercial printing isn't an issue for me.
The software is good, but it's a bit sluggish even on a fast mac. It seems like it's programed in an old language or something. It's not to slick but it gets the job done and is pretty easy to use.
The only thing I'm taking a star off for is that it's not really straight forward how to load all the DVD files onto your hard drive and access them from there rather than having to swap DVD's. At first it seems easy because there is a section in the application preferences for that very feature, but once you get into it you have to find out what folders to copy over, and how to link into those folders.
If anyone has an issue with that, I might be able to help you out. Email me yalskey@mac.com and I'll see what I can do for you.
SIDE NOTE: It seems like most of the graphics in this collection are from England and from the early to mid-1990's. Like the pictures of cell phones are a sure give away. And you can just tell this stuff was photographed in Britain. Not a big deal but I'd thought I'd let you know.
Customer Rating:
Summary: great for screen resolution work
Comment: This has the best variety of photo objects of all the disks I've seen and is the only one of it's kind for a mac. I would look closely before purchasing more that one disk of photo objects. Every photo object disk I've seen is put out by Hemera (check the fine print), which I believe is now represented by Jupiter images, a very large stock agency. Anyway, most of the photo objects you could purchase from any avenue, including their subscription service, is going to be on this disk, which makes it a very good value. My fiance purchased some smaller collections for the PC and all were duplicates.
The images are a little small for any kind of large scale print work, but will work fine for web or smaller print formats, like brochures & such. The images usually need to be descreened in Photoshop before placing, but the embedded alpha channel is still a huge time saver, considering the volume of shots.
The browser is easy to use, and you can just drag and drop files into applications or into a folder for later use (will be a tif with an alpha channel). This is good because you can't really bust open the proprietary format the image files are in without using the browser. There's a small converter for pc out there that does it if you're a pc user, but really, no one will ever need to have all these files converted at once, and dragging what you need out of the browser app does it instantly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great bargain - with limitations.
Comment: I'm going to speak directly to the other graphic designers since they are the customers most likely to be interested in this product and will know what I'm talking about. This collection has a wide variety of images. Not just inanimate objects but lots of people doing lots of things. However every image is at 72 dpi and not very physically large. They can be resampled, of course. But I opened an image that was 13" tall, resampled to 300 dpi and it went down to about 3". But for $50 what do you expect. Still, as I said, there are all kinds of images as long as you don't need them to be any larger than 1.5" to 3". And if you are working in greyscale you might be able to get some more size out of them.
Your absolute best deal is the Encore/Broderbund "ClickArt Professional" for about $80. Those images are at 72 dpi but very physically big.
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