ClickArt 1.5 Million (2008)

I shopped around quite a bit before I got this one and I am happy with my purchase. This has tons of photo objects, photos, and vector art. A good portion the contents is of good quality if you are not looking for large pictures. I do a lot of web design and it is perfect for me. The search capabilities are impressive. When typing in a word or two you can search most of the collection in seconds. It uses hemera's search program and probably contains most of hemera's photo objects. In fact, it has just about anything you are looking for. This is both good and bad and is the only reason why I marked it 4 stars instead of 5. This collection is so extensive it also has stuff in it I don't want to see. Beware of women dressed very immodestly. I haven't looked to see how immodest they might get, but I don't plan on it either. Nevertheless, if you're thinking about children using this or if you have problems with porn, you probably should proceed with extreme caution. Nevertheless, if you have enough self control or don't care about that kind of stuff then this product is pretty useful. For the most part if you are not searching for something bad you won't come across it. In addition, all the pictures are fairly small when you're searching and you have to put in the right dvd and click on the image in order to make it large. So if you are trying to avoid seeing something inappropriate, it is somewhat possible.

This product comes with quite a few fonts, several leave more than to be desired, many are nice. If you want to install all the fonts you will be in for a treat. They are all in separate folders and it forces you to install them one at a time...unless, you know what your doing... I downloaded a program named FileMonkey from download.com and used it to exact all the files from each folder and place them in one folder on my desktop. Then I merely copied all the fonts and pasted them into my font folder inside of my control panel. Nevertheless, this will slow down some programs that use these fonts, because having over two thousand fonts on your computer is a little more than normal.

Also on a different note...
If your a stickler for copyrights, there are some copyright issues associated with this package. Nevertheless, most of it boils down to that you can't sell the pictures inside of the package to other people. You can make something with the images and then let other people display your design, but you can't sell your design. I don't believe this mean that you can't charge people a fee for the creation and ability to display the design, but you can't sell your design to them and allow them to in turn market your design to others. At least, this was my understanding after reading their rights of use.

For those who are concerned about Vista compatibility... it works great. I have been using on Vista for a little over a month and haven't had a problem yet.

Overall the product is quite nice for web designers and for graphic artists who don't need large picts. The downfalls it posses are probably shared by most other competing products.

Severely disappointed. I had Photo Clip Art 150,000 and liked it, but the images from Hemera in it are not intended to be hi-res. I called Hemera and they referred me to Encore and told me that their entire collection was included the Clickart 1.5 Million. I called Encore and they confirmed it, so I ordered, only to have a long series of problems:

-I can't run it using the DVDs since (for some reason) the CD numbers the program asks for don't correspond to the numbers on the disks shipped e.g. the program asks you to "insert Disk 2", then can't find what it needs because Disk 2 is actually something else.

-I tried copying the disks onto my HD to solve the previous problem, figuring it was some sort of re-numbering error made when the images were repackaged/rebundled by Encore. Big problem: some of the web graphic disks took inordinately long to copy (24+ hours!). I tried it on two computers, they both had the same problem. One could hear the drives working like crazy. There should be zip files or some other format if they won't copy readily.

-finally, after having struggled to get them onto my HD, the program finds a few of the images but there are still problems: some of them (such as the cartoons/caricatures) are hopelessly low-res, even for use at screen res. Most of the images it won't find (it still asks for disks), even though I manually pointed it to the files using the "options" menu.

-Lastly, as one might expect, the on-line tech support is useless (doesn't even address this issue) and the telephone support is a long series of phone prompts which ultimately refers you to the online support .

Bottom line: a product that doesn't work with no support = SUX. I'll keep pursuing this since I've already bought it but I strongly recommend against buying it yourself. I'm glad that the one positive reviewer had better results, but I think mine are more likely to be what you'll experience, especially given they there's effectively no support.

Thanks for reading this and buy something else!

I love the new ClickArt products. It's really easy to use - just type in your keywords and you have access to vector images, clipped photo objects, really beautiful photography and more. And all of the images come inside the box. All you have to do is drag and drop them into the program you are working in or export them as JPGs. I use it for everything.