The digital world has allowed people to take thousands of photographs without worrying about running out of film, but many of us almost never print or even make copies of these pictures.

Customers can create stylish and user-friendly photo albums with a simple drag-and-drop system.

But this is risky behaviour, because if your hard drive or memory card crashes, you may lose all your memorable photos.

“I have a big pile of photo CDs at home, thousands of gigabytes of photo files, and have never printed them out, but I have experienced the upset of when a file will no longer open,” said Manuschai Pornsopagul, a veteran photographer who has experienced photos stored on CD, DVD, or even hard drives can sometimes become corrupted after several years.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we printed our photos and made personal albums we can see anytime,” he said.

Manuschai and a group of photographers and academics founded Sibkon Co. Ltd. offering a photo magazine business called ImageGang as an alternative to digital printing.

“I have tried the ImageGang program on the web and enjoyed making my daughter’s album.

“It took me a couple of hours to file the sequences of the photos and decorate them with the tools,” said a mother of a two-year-old who found that the program was easy use for a housewife.

Manuschai said he had researched other photo programs available around the world and could confidently say that ImageGang was the best today.

“We have the combined strengths of each of the other vendors, together with our own unique style,” he said, claiming that ImageGang was the most user-friendly photo program today on the market today.

The business of making photo books is popular in England, Germany, Japan and the US, but it’s not so fashionable in Thailand because of high production costs.

But today,with an increased quality of printing and a price of up to 40 percent lower, ImageGang is making a difference.

Users simply download the software from the web site http://www.imagegang.com, then they can arrange the photos as they wish, by choosing different shapes and sizes offered in the program.

ImageGang has been created based on the veteran photographers’ requirements and thus fulfilled users’ needs. The program can decorate the albums, or organise pictures by sequence.

Sibkon offers a photo book service in collaboration with Canon Marking (Thailand). The Canon digital printer imagePress C6000 operates for customised output, print on-demand, such as documents, manuals, coupons, brochures, name cards, menus and photo albums at sizes of A6, A5, A4 and A3, priced from 100 to 1,900 baht.

“ImageGang is well served for small quantities of printing jobs,” said Manuschai, noting that the software has already been registered for copyright.

The present version 1.5 program comes with photo decoration tools including backgrounds, toppings, themes, photo frames, patterns and clipart.

ImageGang’s Siam Square branch.

Compared to foreign vendors, the managing director claimed ImageGang was the best photo program and offered the shortest download and upload times.

“A 300-page photo magazine takes only five minutes, but with other vendors you have to wait for a half an hour for 70 pages,” he said, explaining that the secret was the logic and algorithm of the software development.

While other general photo programs contain hundreds megabytes, ImageGang encloses just 7Mb. “There is a program published by an Indian company whose features were close to ours, but they consumed 2 DVDs of 10 gigabytes each, in zip format,” Manuschai noted.

Designed to be user-friendly, the drag-and-drop concept of ImageGang makes the job so simple, whether the user is a beginner unfamiliar with computers or highly professional photographer.

The interface and icons are in Thai, enabling anyone here to create their work independently without relying on a programme like Photoshop.

ImageGang software can be used in any major operating system, whether it be Windows, Macintosh or Linux.

All systems use the same installation unit, and function in the same way because they are products of Adobe Air, the latest technology from Adobe.

The software can support .jpg files of more than 12Mb, and more than 200 files in total.

The program can manage pictures quickly with Save, Load or Export options and it enables users to set free their creativity fully and independently, whether it be the placing of pictures across pages or the enlarging or reducing of picture sizes.

The heart of the program is an update of a set of ready-made graphics from the website – the clipart, backgrounds, and the photo frames. Having these in the program helps users adjust the look of the photo book and design it to suit any occasion or festive season.

With more than 50 ready-made frames both in portrait and landscape formats, the program enables users to create a photo book with their personal touch. Tools such as Zoom, Smart Guide for page lay-out and Cut, Copy and Paste make for easier handling of tasks.

Having been developed for a year, ImageGang will launch the latest version, 2.0 by the end of this month with new features such as screen server album and digital photo frames.

For further flexibility still, if users don’t want to or don’t have the time – to deal with the photo arrangement themselves, they can pay for the company to do it for them, at a charge of 500 baht.

Having set up its first shop, located in Siam Square, ImageGang will expand its franchise service with branches in Chiang Mai, Khon Kaen and around the South of Thailand by the end of this year.

ImageGang general manager Kittipong Ketrat noted that the traditional photo lab business was coming to an end and today the digital printer price has been coming down to a reasonable point.

The service of ImageGang has combined the digital printing with photo business and bridged by software. The program will be exported to Singapore and some other countries over the next year.

The development team is now working on the software engine to have ImageGang comply with e-books and other media such as mobile phones. It then should have a support community on the company website, or the users can link to their own websites or blogs.

The general manager explained that once the users manage the photo album and “save for print”, the feature would allow them to do “print for e-book”.

The company plans to provide ImageGang software across several channels, for example universities, to help students do reports and decorate their work with the features of ImageGang.

Kittipong noted that when he went to the South four years ago to help in the aftermath of the Tsunami crisis, he saw a man whose entire family and home had been carried away by the tidal wave, and the only thing he held in his hands was a picture of his family.

“I think that at that moment, nothing on Earth was as valuable to him as the photo”, he said.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.