Forget quilting, embroidery, folk art or dé-coupage — there’s a new kid in craft town: scrapbooking. Now, Ulead’s My Scrapbook 2 brings this paper-based craft into the PC age.

click here to see a screenshot example

Instead of cutting out paper borders and punching motifs, My Scrapbook 2 lets you easily add embellishments to your scrapbook pages in very little time. Using one of the Project templates, for instance, I created a scrapbook page complete with photos, captions and stamp effects in about two minutes.

Users can start in the Browse section, which is structured like Windows Explorer, to find their images, borders and backgrounds before switching to the Project section to complete the scrapbook pages. If you add the photos and backgrounds that you’ll need to the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen in Browse, completing the project couldn’t be easier.

Of course, before you add photos you may want to touch them up a little (remove red-eye, etc) and My Scrapbook 2 includes digital photo editing tools that offer painless, push-button corrections for common problems. You can also use the Browse section to manage your digital photos, with features like batch processing.

My Scrapbook 2 includes lots of themed templates (wedding, baby, Christmas, and so on) that you can use to create pages that can be e-mailed, printed, or turned into calendars and the like. But, be warned, some of them are pretty daggy. Luckily, it’s easy to start with a template and change the details you don’t like. Templates you create can then be used to add extra pages later.

Die-hard scrapbookers (although they may appreciate the tools to get their work into HTML) may find My Scrapbook 2 a cop out. But for everyone else, it’s a fast, simple way to create scrapbook pages for Web, e-mail or print. 

In brief: Ulead My Scrapbook 2
Easy-to-use, reasonably-priced software makes for fast scrapbook pages you can share.
Price: $49.95
Distributor: Lako Pacific
Phone: 1800 657 601
http://www.lakopacific.com