Digital cameras are very convenient for taking photos, but locating them later? That's a different story. It's all too easy to end up with a disorganised mess, hundreds of photos in a single folder, making it particularly difficult to find the ones you want.

Fortunately Ability Photoalbum has one very effective solution, which could bring order back to your chaotic photo collection. It lets you categorise your images by storing them in albums, perhaps one for Family, another for Holidays -- whatever you want.

Of course you could do something similar in Explorer, by creating appropriately named folders, but Albums have another advantage: they hold shortcuts to photos, not the photos themselves. This means "Granny.jpg" could appear in the "Granny" album, and "Family", and maybe "Holidays" if it was taken when you went to stay, yet you still only have one copy on the drive.

Creating the albums only takes a moment. Just click the Album tab, select File > New > Album, and give it an appropriate name. Then either locate files using the Explorer-like thumbnail view, or via the Search tool, right-click on them and select Add to Album. And so in future, clicking on that album will reveal whatever images you've selected, no matter where they're located on the hard drive.

The feature list doesn't stop there, either. There's a Print Wizard for printing out your entire album, an option to send your selected images by email, a Slideshow feature, and even batch file format conversion that includes support for PowerPoint (.ppt).

Photoalbum is just one of the packages available in Ability Office 4. There's also a word processor, spreadsheet, database and spreadsheet, all compatible with their equivalents in Microsoft Office. Plus a versatile image editor in Ability Photopaint. The individual tools are available for £19.99 each, in various combinations for £29.99 or £39.99, or you can buy everything for £49.99 -- make your decision at www.ability.com.