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(A genealogy multimedia creator) Recently (December, 2005) I was able to try out Passage Express, a software program designed for the family historian to create multimedia presentations from various digital genealogical information such as family photos, documents and family tree data. Output can be to CD or DVD (deluxe version), allowing you to easily share your family treasures with relatives. Although the program is a bit rough around the edges, I found that within a few hours of installing the program on my computer, I was able to produce a test DVD that played a family photo slideshow on my TV and a test CDROM that launched on the computer, presenting an attractive menu allowing the viewing of photos, documents, video clips, family tree data (GEDCOM) and audio recordings. The program is feature laden and a more sophisticated CD or DVD would take longer to produce, but Passage Express makes the process quite simple. The program comes with an example project and several templates that make the initial creation process quite easy. A hint is to make use of your right mouse button, since they've done a good job of providing context sensitive menus which pop up when the right mouse button is clicked. These are often easier to use than the main window menus. I quickly created a test project by pointing Passage Express to several folders with data I already had made up (folders with genealogy photos, documents and GEDCOMs). It incorporated these into the project I was making. I could open up the photos and add captioning (however see the IPTC issue below) and even narrate a sound clip to be attached to the photo. A neat feature are the "face labels" - you can select areas of a photo and put in text to be displayed on the photo (such as the names of the people in those photos). It can handle any form of document and even allows you to attach viewers (i.e. Adobe PDF Reader or a MS Word viewer) to the project which Passage Express will offer to install on the recipient's computer if they don't have a viewer for that type of file. It can natively handle RTF text files (which any word processor can produce). It can also work directly with multimedia files from Ancestral Quest, Legacy, PAF and RootsMagic (I wasn't able to test this out since I use Family Tree Maker). A shortcoming with the program (considering its genealogical roots) is that it doesn't directly support IPTC or XMP metadata (archival standard for digital photo labelling). To caption my digital photos, which were already fully labelled with IPTC caption data, I opened up Breezebrowser to view the IPTC data and then copied and pasted that data into the Passage Express photo caption area for each photo. The good news is that in most cases Passage Express doesn't strip out the IPTC/XMP data, photos labelled that way will retain that information on a CD made by Passage Express. The bad news is that it does strip out the IPTC/XMP data when a photo is saved from within the Project Builder section of the program. This is too bad because that section contains an excellent photo captioning feature - you can create a new photo with the caption text right on it (similar to Breezebrowser but much more automated). However this new photo will have all the IPTC/XMP data removed. The program is available for Windows PCs (Windows 98 and higher) and comes in two flavours, a standard version and a deluxe version. The deluxe version offers many extra features such as direct scanning, image editing, music import, text slides and more. For many, the deluxe version would be well worth the extra cost. For anyone wishing to do a digital genealogical project, this would be a great program to have. For more information about the program, including a comparison chart of the two versions, visit their website at www.passageexpress.com |