What our customer's say!"Depends on your use", The Hemera "Photo Clip Art 150,000" contains almost all the images in this collection, but this is nearly 4x the price for 1/3 the images. What is the difference? The images here have about a 20% higher resolution and transparency masks (i.e. Photo Clip Art forces you to have a colored background, but you can have no background with photo objects).
Neither is really suitable for print unless you don't want to print any of the photos beyond 2 inches high/wide. If you're designing for the web, you're usually going to throw a background in behind photos anyway, or if you need the transparency, you can easily select some obscure color for the background and "magic wand" it out in 30 seconds.
So, if you bought the whole photo objects collection, you'd spend nearly ten times as much to get mostly the same photos (i.e. Photo Clip Art has 26 photos of an Asian woman as a nurse while Photo Objects has the same 26 photos plus 3 more) a little larger and with transparency.
If you're a professional designer who would use this extensively, the extra cost might be worth it. But if you're dabbling in web design, get the "Photo Clip Art 150,000" instead and save yourself a LOT of money.
"Beware Indeed...", Maybe I am naive but I had assumed these images were in a usable format. Instead, you have to export them, one by one, via a cumbersome 5-step process which is quite pointless and only serves to slow you down. This is not particularly useful to a designer. I just wanted some clip art. Now I see why they charge so little -- they cripple you!
Also I concur that the images are not nearly as good a quality as Hemera would have you believe. All in all, though I love the quantity of images, the quality (and usability) is deeply lacking. Oh, and little would you guess, but if you want more than one computer to be able to use this library (i.e. over a network) you have to call them for a bulk license. Come on! That's what we designers use software like Portfolio for. Not the freeware-quality Hemera Clip Art Thing (tm).
I had high hopes. Now I feel generous in offering two stars for any such products.
"Too much of the same stuff but still worth it.", As stated on the other reviews, I agree that this package has way too much repeated images. Expect to see over 232 balloons(some in same colors too!), and countless pictures of eggs.
This package needs heavy image editing. I have a feeling the package will end up half the size if all the repeated images were taken out.
Good side to this is that it is very affordable. Though it has a lot of repeats it is worth having. There are still lot of selections to choose from. Just dig dig and dig.
The search engine works very well. It¡¯s pretty easy to locate images with it.
If you have about extra 4.27GB of space in your computer, I strongly recommend copying all the images from 8 CDs to your hard drive for ease of use. Or else, it will constantly ask you to put in different CD each time you are looking for a different image. I don¡¯t know how it's organized but let¡¯s say you are looking for a rose(just an example), 3 out of 5 rose will be on one CD and the rest will be in the other CD. It¡¯s a pain to keep changing CD¡¯s.
For window XP users, you do have to download the latest upgrade from Hemera website.
Personally I think Hemera Photo-Objects 50K Vol I has more interesting selection of images than Vol II.
Either way, if you are a designer this will be pretty nice package to own.
"A designer's dream product!", As I went to look for photo objects for my firm, I saw two people standing there holding a box of Hemera's Photo Objects. I couldn't help but tell these two people that the product is worth buying. They have their own design studio and Hemera Photo Objects Volume II is definitely worth owning!
For my business, Hemera's products have saved me a lot of time and money. With Volume 2 of the series, it featured an OS X version which I have been looking for and the search for photo objects in different categories is a blessing.
This review is for the updated version for OS X for my MAC G4.
The new search engine works beautifully and the program will first install the thumbnails (I recommend having quite a bit of drive space... If you are a graphic designer, I'm assuming that you do already). Thus when you type a word, you will see the thumbnails correspond to that word. Those that are bright and colored are for the version you own, if it's faded - those photos are from the other version (in this case VERSION I) that you may want to purchase.
I have had the chance to read the reviews on this product and here's the nitty gritty. For those who are professionals and non-professionals who are looking for photo objects that are non hi-res (600x600) with the option to save as 300DPI, you will love this program.
For designers - To get the best use for these images for bigger print sizes, I save the files as a transparent PNG, instead of TIF when I need to get the image for a project utilizing a larger dimension. Work with your desktop publishing program and export to EPS and then use your Distiller to make the PDF.
If you want a very hi-res version of the photo object, then you will need to purchase it from the company. There are many awesome photos in this collection. With 50,000 images...that is a lot. Sure, there are multiple ones of the same photo but my gosh...for the price. You can't beat that - for many stock photos, it cost $[money]+ for 100 photos. In this case, 50,000 for less than a $[money].
I can't comment on the PC version of this software but for those using the new operating system for the MAC, make sure that you find out that it is the OS X compatible version (the OS X logo on the front of the box).
Do I have a gripe? Not really. If anything, after seeing the photos that are faded out in the search box (the photos for Version I, which I definitely want to buy it now), I wish I picked up Version I as well. And that's definitely what I'm going to do next.
"Hemera Photo-Objects Vol I Costumers: buy the Vol II !", I've bought Photo-Objects Vol I and waited to buy Vol II. When you install the search engine of Vol I, you have the option of displaying Vol II photos or not. Just turn it on and discover what you're missing...
Read this reviews before You buy..."Wait for Price Drop", Thanks for your reviews. You just saved me $100.00. When people from different walks of life have the same opinion, the reviews speak for themselves. Thanks again!
Gene
"Very crashy....no support", First of all, I agree that the employee review is a bit tacky, but at least he was honest, he didn't come on with a hotmail address. Secondly, I don't like all the images of slides either......give me the images that are ON the slides! The backgrounds might be nice if they weren't mutilated....made "grungy". I can do this myself if that effect is needed. All that said....there are still a LOT of good images here you won't find elsewhere. And the fact that they are royalty-free is the big selling point. My problem is, it is about the crashiest program I own. I run it on an Acer Travelmate laptop, P3 600 w/ 128 meg of ram and Win98SE. A pretty standard configuration. It will not run if ANY other program is running. And if you forget and try to run it before you shut everything down, forget it. After it crashes once, even when you close all other programs it won't run until you reboot. Talk about a major headache!!! My emails to support have all come back as "mailbox full", so I guess others are having this problem. Or they just don't ever read their mail. They also don't respond to inquiries about the DVD version. Why they didn't ISSUE this on DVD is a total mystery......of course then I'd only have 1 coaster instead of a set of eight. :-) Version 1 was great. Too bad V2 is such a disappointment. Hopefully they will get their act together.
"Hemera should not review its own software!!", Let the customers decide for themselves without trying to skew the voting with a 5 rating from someone with a "hemera.com" email address. Amazon should delete that review. Does anyone know how to go about requesting this? (I looked through the Volume 2 catalog in a store, and was very skeptical about this product myself, and I own Vol 1... what's with all the repetition and goofy "groups of 35mm slides"??)
"Definate Downgrade", If you don't own volume one, you will probably like this suite. If you do own volume one, you will definately hate it. Absolute waste of money at half the price. Most of the pics are washed out tapestry scenes that have virtually no practical use anywhere. And some of the pics are already on Vol 1. In other words, buy Vol 1, skip this disaster.
