My Memories Suite review

A little while ago I was asked to do a review and giveaway for the My Memories Suite. I've decided to this in two parts; today the review, and in a couple of days the giveaway.

At first I was hesitant to write a review about this software, as it is scrapbooking software, and I'm not a scrapbooker. However, I downloaded the trial version, had a little play around with it and decided it might be quite fun for presenting photos on my blog as I have seen other people do.

Here's a page I made for a few doilies I made over the last week or so. These photos were again taken with that lovely EOS 5D Mark II. 

This is a page with some views of the town we live in, Roermond.

It's quite simple to make some nice pages with the software. I'm not a terribly creative person when it comes to these kinds of things, so I'm sure you guys and gals can come up with something better.

The software itself is very easy to use. There are premade pages, where you just add your own photos and text, you can also design your own pages, which I did. You can choose your own background paper, matting, and embellishments. A limited selection of the papers and embellishments come with the software, you can pay for different kits, and there are also some free kits on the My Memories website, these kits can also be used in software such as Adobe Photoshop.

As well as making single pages with just images, you can make interactive scrapbooks, with videos, music and other sounds and you can make calendars, which can be printed, burnt to DVD or exported to your iPod, so you can share them with your friends.

Now, I do have a couple of criticisms of the software. First of all, you need to have Quicktime installed to run it. I don't like Quicktime, it slows down my computer, and it is constantly bothering me with updates, not just for itself, but it also tries to get me to install Safari and iTunes. Okay, so My Memories can't control what Quicktime does, but for me, the use of Quicktime gives it a little minus mark.

Secondly, and this might just be related to Quicktime running, but the My Memories Suite is quite slow on my computer. I'm running Windows 7 32-bit on a laptop with 1GB of RAM and 80GB of hard disk space. This is on the lower end of supported systems for this software, so if you have anything less than this, you are going to have problems running the software.

Finally, you need to have a very good Internet connection to download this software. I have a decent, not great, connection and I nearly gave up on trying to install the My Memories Suite, in all it took me about two hours to download and install. This is more time than I have ever spent on downloading any other piece of software.

Overall, the My Memories Suite is a nice bit of software. If you like embellishing your photographs and spicing up your videos, you'll have a lot of fun. You do need a decent computer to run it, and a good Internet connection to install it, if you do not purchase the physical disc.

If you'd like any more information on this software check out these links:

Blog- http://blog.mymemories.com/
Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/pages/MyMemories/140359372717593
Twitter- http://twitter.com/#!/mymemoriessuite

The giveaway will be up in the next couple of days. If you're unsure whether you'd want to/be able to use this  software, I suggest checking out the trial version, if you win the giveaway, you won't have to install the software again, you just have to input the registration key. 

If you choose to buy anything off the My Memories website, you can use the following code at check-out to receive $10 off the software, and a $10 voucher to use on the site, STMMMS78498.