This is not the most exciting or world-shattering piece of software on the planet, but it’s worth a quick review anyway. Most people will be familiar with clip art, the sort of thing that first appeared (probably) in early incarnations of WordPerfect and similar programs. The idea was that you could smarten up your document with a few images – usually in a mildly cartoon style.
Clip art is often ‘clipped’ (hence the name) so that you can flow text around the edges of an image, rather than the usually square borders. That’s something that’s easier to do with cartoon and hand-drawn graphics than it is with photographs. As you can now probably guess, Hemera’s Photo Clip Art 100,000 contains actual photographs which can be embedded in documents or used in graphical designs.
There are hundreds of different categories within the collection, from agriculture and animals to business accessories, fantasy, health and beauty, toys, vegetables and work. There’s no denying that these do add a certain impact to documents and other designs, and it saves a lot of hassle compared with sourcing your own photos. Rather than being organised by category in directories, there’s a search engine that you have to install before you can view the images. This helps you find what you’re looking for, but is probably a bit over the top; most graphics packages have ‘browse’ functions anyway.
Speaking of which, the images here can be used with all the major Windows and Mac graphics packages. You simply drag and drop your chosen image into the piece of software you’re using, from where it can be tweaked to your heart’s content. Alternatively you can export the image, which lets you define the background colour first.
There’s one significant problem with Hemera Photo Clip Art 100,000. According to the licence agreement, you’re supposed to include a copyright notice on any document you produce that includes a photo from the package. A bit heavy-handed, we feel, especially for a children’s party or a birthday card.
Company: Hemera
Contact: 01256 707877