Review —The Big Box of Art

Do you want almost instant access to 350,000 royalty-free images to use in your printed publications or on your Web site? If you do, Hemera's Big Box of Art is a good answer. This program on 21 CD's contains thousands of clip art images, Web graphics, color photographs, raster illustrations and Hemera "Photo Objects." Its search engine lets you easily search for the graphic you need using a few key words, without having to shuffle through the stack of CDs.

Installation was easy, flawless and standard. After shutting down any other Windows programs that were running (including my anti-virus program), I inserted disc number one in the CD drive and double clicked on the Setup.exe file. As usual, you enter your name, the serial number, and Setup does the rest, including putting two new icons on your desktop for The Big Box of Art (TBBOA) and PhotoFont Maker.

When you open the program, a window opens with several boxes that can be filled in and 25 thumbnail pictures. In the first box, you can put key words that describe what type of graphic you want. The middle box defaults to "All Categories", but you can select from about twenty categories such as NATURE, TRAVEL, PEOPLE, etc. In the third box, you can select type of image you want (Vector clip art, color photograph, B&W photo, etc.); the default is All Image Types. You can also select whether the search engine uses all the key words or matches any one word.

After you have made your choices and pressed Enter, the middle window fills up with a list of images meeting your criteria and below this the thumbnail images. The list of images also lists the category, all keywords for the image, number of the CD on which the large image resides and the type of graphic. You may scroll through either the list or the thumbnails and select one. If you then insert the listed CD, you can view a large version of the selected image and proceed to use the image in any of several ways. Double click the large image, and a new screen opens with the image and boxes to select what you wish to do with the image. Choices include exporting to a variety of programs, export as a file, use as Web art, etc. You can go forward by clicking next and a wizard helps you select image size, format, drag and drop, graphic type, and copy to the clipboard. (Almost any graphics type can be selected, including, .tiff, .gif, .jpg, .bmp, .wpg, and .pcx.) After you have copied the image into another program or as a separate file, it can be moved, sized and changed just like any other graphic.

In addition to various graphics and photographs, TBBOA has a type of graphic called a PhotoObject, which is basically a photograph of an object with the background removed. The PhotoObject maintains the quality of a photograph, but has the flexibility of clip art.

Another associated program that is installed with TBBOA allows you to use photographs embedded in text. This program is useful mostly for making titles or large letters where you can embed a texture or other photograph into the writing. This program is very intuitive and easy to use It is a nice feature, but one that would only be used occasionally.

Two additional programs are included on a separate CD and can be installed or not as desired. Greeting Card Creator and CD Design Creator are perhaps useful if you don't already have programs to perform these tasks. These two bonus programs consist mainly of templates for creating various types of greeting cards or labels for CDs. You can modify the templates for your requirements and, of course, use graphics from TBBOA. However, I found both these bonus programs somewhat inflexible in allowing customization.

8200 Hemera offers free support for 90 days to registered users. I have had a lot of trouble with these optional programs freezing my computer. Even the well known CTRL-ALT-DEL would not work, and I had to turn off and reboot my computer manually. I contacted Hemera Tech Support to see if the company had any solutions to these problems which did not occur on the main TBBOA program—only when I tried to run the bonus programs. Tech support suggested removing and then reinstalling the programs making sure no other programs were running during installation. This procedure did not correct the problem. Their second suggestion was to try downloading the programs from their Web site. I have not had time to try this suggestion yet.

The minimum system requirements for TBBOA are: Windows, 98, ME, 2000, or XP; a Pentium 233 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, 80 MB of hard drive space, 256 color display, and a CD-ROM drive. The recommended requirements: Pentium 400 MHz or better, a 400 MB hard drive, 128 MHz of RAM and a High color (16 bit) display adapter.

If you have a need for graphics for printed publications, computerized presentations, or Web sites, I think you would find The Big Box Of Art a good solution. It has 350,000 royalty-free images to select from and an excellent search engine for finding the graphic you want by inserting a few key words and selecting the type of image you need. Although you can select the type of image you want to search for (B&W photo, color photo, vector graphic etc.) I would have liked more simple B&W graphics which are more usable in newsletters such as User Friendly where the images are relatively small and must be simple to be effective. The color images can be converted to B&W in a graphics program, but even so, multiple shades of gray don't always print well.

The PhotoFont Maker was an interesting and useful plus, but the other two bonus programs, for me, at least caused more problems than solutions.

Hemera Technologies Inc. 490 St. Joseph Blvd. Suite 301, Quebec, QC, Canada. Phone (819)772-TBBOA can be ordered on line at http://www.hemera.com at a list price of $30.