Odds are you probably have a clutch of digital photos taking up space on your computer that could be better presented as a handsome scrapbook. Or even a video, a slideshow, or a website. With Scrapbook MAX! ($29) you can do all that, and a bit more besides. A confusing interface, however, keeps it from taking down our Editors’ Choice for digital scrapbooking software, MyMemories Suite 5.

I had no trouble installing Scrapbook MAX! on my Windows 7 laptop, and it also supports Windows Vista and XP. The application comes preloaded with two expansion packs, which include clip art and other embellishments to give your scrapbook that homespun feel. If you want more add-ons, each expansion pack will cost you about $20 a pop. Page templates are also available for $3 to $4 each. I’m impressed with the quality of these add-ons, but apps like Panstoria Artisan 4 have much cheaper expansions.

Building Your Scrapbook
Most scrapbook apps include a media browser that gives you quick access to artistic embellishments and the pictures you’ll place in your book. Artisan 4 is particularly notable for letting you sort images according to which ones are already in your book and which have yet to be placed. Scrapbook MAX!, on the other hand, has you add photos one page at a time, and it doesn’t make it easy to move pictures or elements from page to page.

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Once you place your images on the page, you can easily re-arrange them on the page and resize them to your heart’s content. Buttons along the top let you adjust how objects overlap, similar to layers in Photoshop, which is a critical feature for customizing how images appear on the page. Some apps, like PhotoOne Print, do without a layers tool altogether. However, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to rotate page elements in Scrapbook MAX!. An exhaustive search led me to the user forums, where I found the answer (hover over the edge of an object), but you shouldn’t have to go that far for an answer to such a simple question.

Scrapbook MAX! is full of interface stumbling blocks. Another example: To adjust an image’s position within a frame, I had to open the photo editor, press CTRL, left click, and move the image. In general, a user experience makeover would help a lot.

In addition to adding clip art and images, you can spruce up your designs with patterns in various cookie-cutter shapes. Serif CraftArtist 2 also has a similar feature, but it also lets you hand-cut and shape the material freeform. Scrapbook MAX! does include some advanced options like the ability to place text that follows an adjustable arc or that can be bent, and even placing an image within text. Artisan 4 and MyMemories 4 both handled text better by making similar tools easier to find and use, however.

Photo Editing
Double-clicking an image pulls up an editor in which you adjust a picture’s hue, saturation, and lightness. You can also change an image’s shape to one of several premade forms and the position of an image in its frame. These last two tools are out of place in a photo editor and should really be accessible from the layout view. An eraser tool lets you cut out objects from images. That’s a decent assortment of tools, but CraftArtist’s photo editing tools actually do their job much better than Scrapbook MAX!’s do.

Right-clicking an image gives you access to 11 common image effects like sepia, solarize, and oil painting. But if you want to make adjustments on any of those effects, you’ll need to go all the way to the app’s advanced options. Again, I feel like that’s Scrapbook MAX! getting in the way of my creativity.

Scrapbook MAX! also has tools for removing scratches and red eye. Many red-eye removal tools in scrapbook apps such as Artisan 4 don’t work well at all, but Scrapbook MAX! did a good job with my test image. That said, I still think it’s better to touch up your pictures in a dedicated image editor like Adobe Photoshop Elements before laying them out.

Printing and Export
Scrapbook MAX! does let you print your creations through Photofinale.com, but printing is not integrated into the app itself. It’s doable, but getting a book made out of your project from Scrapbook MAX! is kind of a pain. A future version of this review will have an evaluation of the service’s print quality. Note that competitors Artisan 4, Foto.com, and MyMemories all take you seamlessly from creating to ordering a scrapbook. 

Like MemoryMixer, Scrapbook MAX! let me turn my scrapbook pages into slideshows and videos; I could even include a soundtrack. Despite its many flaws, I still prefer MemoryMixer for making movies, however, since it let me time musical cues to specific slides. You can also export your project as a standalone .exe file or a screensaver. 

If you’d rather print at home, or use a different printing service, Scrapbook MAX! can spit out JPGs, PNGs, TIFs, and PDFs of your project.

Start Scrapbooking!
Scrapbook MAX! has all the right tools, and I appreciate its focus on simplicity and its numerous export options. But it’s in bad need of a user-experience makeover. If I have to dig through help documentation to understand basic interface functions, this app’s in trouble. If I have to go to an online forum, it’s really in trouble. The parts of a great (or at least better) application are all here, they just need to be exposed.

Both the Web and desktop versions of Foto.com do a great job of quickly laying out a photobook, and scrapbooking Editors’ Choice MyMemories Suite 5 holds its top honors because it’s both powerful and easy to use. Look to those scrapbooking programs instead.