A scrapbook is a collection of notes, photos and memorabilia that focuses on a particular theme or topic, and makes for pleasant reminiscent browsing on some future rainy day. Either that or it's anything written by Danielle Steele. This offering from Greenstreet lets the user concoct his or her very own digital scrapbook.

So what's the advantage of a digital scrapbook? Firstly, storing it on your hard drive is obviously a more compact solution than lumping a big book around. Secondly, Art & Craft Scrapbook allows you to not only splash photos, art and text on your virtual pages, but also to embed music and videos. Well, sort of.

In fact what the scrapbook hosts is links to music and videos, small icons which when selected play the relevant file in whichever media player you've specified as the default on your system. This isn't quite as impressive as having the film playing on the page, but it's still a useful feature. Finally, the most obvious boon this program brings is the flexibility of design in your book.

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Photos can be moved around, stretched, rotated or flipped, and there are some basic editing effects such as fades that can be applied to images. Art & Craft Scrapbook also lets you work with clipart, text, supertext (fancy looking text), freehand drawing and the aforementioned video and music file links.

The program is easy to use, employing a simple three part interface which consists of the main working area, the design and the palette control windows. The design window lists each piece of material in a page (be it photo, text or whatever), and maintains a recycle bin, so anything that has been deleted can be rescued here.

The palette control window is the more important of the two, as this sports context sensitive controls for whatever is selected at the time (i.e. for text this is font sizes, bold or italics, alignment and so forth). All the controls are pretty much self explanatory, and it really is a snap to get going, which is just as well as the initial help wizard is on the flimsy side. Luckily the online help is fairly detailed if you do get stuck with anything.

Some sample photos and clipart are supplied, although not in huge amounts. There's an option to grab further artwork from the Greenstreet online shop, but the catch is you'll need to pay extra for this. Once you're finished, the resulting scrapbook can be printed out if you want a hard copy, although it's disappointing that the option to export to a self-contained EXE file, or publish to the web, is restricted to those who've bought the deluxe version of the program.

Art & Craft Scrapbook is an easy to use program which produces reasonable results, although it's a little short on clipart and features unless you plump for the more expensive deluxe version.