Key Photos Both the low price of quality colour printers and the explosion of electronic publishing on the Internet have combined to make digital photography a mass market. If you don't have access to a scanner or digital camera - or if you don't plan to take a globetrotting photography trip - you can pick up CD-ROM discs stuffed full of digital pics. Key Photos from SoftKey is one such disc, boasting 2100 royalty-free images from "the World's leading photographers". There's no clue anywhere as to whom these eminent snappers are, but there are indeed over 2000 images spread across a total of 88 different categories. Although there is cataloguing software provided for both PC and Mac, you're stuck with working out what the categories are by looking at the folder names - there's no text index at all. As well as fairly standard categories like agriculture, computers and health there are some rather odd inclusions - why elephants should merit their own category with only six images is anyone's guess. The images are stored on CD as standard files unlike with some photo collections, so you don't need any special front-end software - simply copy them to hard drive or use straight from the CD. The images are stored as uncompressed TIF files, so any graphics program should be able to use them. If not, a short trip through a viewer and converter like GEMView does the trick. Despite TIF supporting colour depths up to 24-bit, every image provided is in indexed 256-colour format, which is rather disappointing. Admittedly, it keeps the file sizes down without using lossy JPEG compression, but SoftKey have chosen to leave the TIFs uncompressed anyway. Generally, the photos are of a high standard, although they are all quite small, especially if you plan to use them in printed publications. Portrait images are 407 by 600 pixels, with landscape pics saved at 600 by 407 pixels. With some of the high-resolution printers available today, you're talking a very small print size without re-scaling and the pixelation which accompanies it. The 'royalty free' tag on the CD cover is misleading, especially if you're looking for images for web pages. Only when the shrink-wrapped CD is opened does the license reveal that you can't use them in electronic form, and explicitly forbids Internet redistribution. Very naughty, since you can't see this until you've handed the cash over and opened the disc. For low-grade paper publishing or a source of inspiration, Key Photos would be a better buy with a few quid shaved off the price. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Publisher SoftKey International, Heritage House, 21 Inner Park Road, London SW19 6ED. Cost : ś9.99 Requires CD-ROM drive, graphics package supporting TIF images. Pros Cheap, nice photography. Cons Restrictive usage license, low colour depth, small images. Rating : 60% ** Images and captions ** ** KEYPHOTO.GIF Nice photography, shame about the small images.