Centico Press Release

Centico Photo Album Keeps Photos Safe with Time Warp Backup

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL (January 12th, 2006) - Centico Ltd. announced today the release of Centico Photo Album 1.0, a digital photo management application for Windows 2000/XP with advanced support for backing up photos.

Centico Photo Album uses an advanced backup mechanism for digital photos called Time Warp Backup. Time Warp Backup backs-up editing changes (such as cropping and sharpening) independently from the photos themselves. In case of data loss, the photos will be restored along with all of the editing changes that had been made to them, even if these changes were made AFTER the photos were backed up. This makes it much easier to backup photos than with regular backup software, because the user only has to backup the photos once in their lifetime, instead of being forced to backup again and again whenever the photos are edited.

In addition to its backup capabilities, Centico Photo Album is also a full-featured digital photos manager that lets the user organize photos in albums, fix them with tools such as Crop and Sharpen, add tags, add descriptions to photos, find photos by text or tags, print or email photos, and view slideshows. Centico Photo Album keeps track of all the editing changes made to a photo and lets the user undo them at any time in the future. Photos may be stored on many disks: hard drives, CD-ROM’s, USB drives, etc.; the application keeps track of all of the copies of an image automatically.

A unique feature of Centico Photo Album is the ability to insert Album Notes directly inside albums. Album Notes are short paragraphs that the user can insert between photos. They can be used to describe groups of photos, create a travelogue, relate an anecdote about the photos, etc. By allowing both photos and text in an album, Centico Photo Album blurs the line between photo managers and desktop publishing software.

Each album in Centico Photo Album has an attached “Shoebox”, in which the user can place photos that shouldn’t appear in the album, e.g. because they’re duplicates, too dark, etc. This mimics the way users have long organized printed photos during the days of film cameras: the best photos went into the album, and the lesser photos were saved in an envelope or shoebox in the attic.

Centico Photo Album can convert albums into HTML Web Albums and upload them to the internet using FTP. A common real-world problem with Web Albums is that it can take many nights of work to create a nicely formatted album, because of the need to edit the photos and write descriptions and Album Notes. In order to provide instant gratification to eager friends and family, Centico Photo Album allows uploading a Web Album to the internet while it’s still being worked on. Afterwards, the user can regenerate the Web Album very quickly after every small improvement. Centico Photo Album will automatically recreate and upload only the actual changes that had been made to the album, making this a fast and practical approach for publishing Web Albums incrementally.

In addition to viewing the user’s photo collection in albums, Centico Photo Album contains a built-in file viewer that displays the image files and folders on the user’s hard drive, similarly to Windows Explorer. The Files Panel and the albums can be viewed simultaneously in split-screen mode, allowing the user to drag individual photos from the hard drive directly into any album.

Centico Photo Album is available for purchase for $49.95 (US) from the Centico website at http://www.centico.com/cpa/ . A free trial version is available for download.