Appeal & Flexibility:  

Smilebox has the largest selection of pre-designed pages and albums of all the Mac scrapbooking products we reviewed but there is no flexibility to change the design. All projects are a take-them-as-they are proposition and you can’t design your own from a blank page. A few of the designs offer limited background choices but it’s just a choice between a few different colors.

Importing:  

This scrapbooking software imports photos, music and video only. You can import digital elements but can’t really adjust or use them with photos in the program. If you wanted to create a new image with a photo and digital element outside of Smilebox and then save it as a single image AND THEN import it into the software, that would work but it’s a lot effort to go through for questionable results.

Design Features:  

Smilebox has a very limited photo editor. Essentially all you can do is rotate or zoom in on a photo or change it to black and white. Text style and font is tied to the design and isn’t changeable. It will resize if there is a lot of text in a text block but you have no control over that.

Output Options:  

The output options are where Smilebox really shines. The focus of this Mac scrapbooking software is to create easily-shared movies, layouts, cards, calendars among other things and enable the user to post their projects on Facebook, MySpace or their own blog as well as email, print or burn them to a DVD. It accomplishes all that quickly and easily.

Ease of Use:  

Creating a movie is very easy to do and uploading to an online site, emailing or printing it is a snap.

Saving text can be a real pain. It’s far too easy to accidentally delete text when what you were really trying to do was simply edit it. What’s worse is there’s no undo to fall back on.

Help & Support:  

Encore USA offers a fairly standard compliment of help and support in the form of email submissions, FAQs page, a newsletter and tutorials. One of their strengths is the frequency that new designs are provided (and automatically downloaded to the software). The designers release new designs for each holiday and occasions such as weddings and graduations frequently—usually more than once or twice a month.

Smilebox is more of a high-powered e-card creator than a true scrapbooking software program but it is ideal for scrapbooking novices that just want plug-and-play functionality and nicely laid-out designs. If you’re looking for Mac scrapbooking software with more customizable capabilities be sure to check out the reviews for top-ranked MemoryMixer, Polaroid My Memories Suite and iScrapbook.