Apple Reviews

I made the mistake of buying both this and the photo clip art images. The searching is terrible, but that's no surprise. The vector images aren't really vector, as they can only be downloaded as EPS files (for Mac). The quality of the images themselves are awful, and look like shady scan jobs. Definitely not for professional use, but barely good enough for fun use. Spend your money elsewhere, like the Art Explosion series. I love these and it comes with a huge catalog book to look up your clip art.

Works with AppleWorks and Adobe Illustrator

Big Box of Art works well with Adobe Systems' Illustrator and PhotoShop. Also, you can use it with QuarkXpress, Word 98 and Corel Draw 8. Not mentioned in the Big Box of Art User Guide is Big Box of Art working with AppleWorks that comes free and works well with most Mac computers.

Vector It. You will love Big Box of Art's vector art. Using Adobe Illustrator you can now make your posters and illustrations assignments standout from other graphic illustrators. Big Box of Art vector art allows you to save vector graphics in EPS format for use in your Adobe Illustrator work.

Your Choices using Export Wizard

After you select the image you want, double-click on the image to start the Export Wizard. Now you can choose how the image will be used. The wizard chooses the suitable format and image size based on your choice of the program you want to place it in for final editing. Advanced users will probably want to just select "Export." With the Wizard you have a Resize/Crop dialog. The resolution can be adjusted. If you need to crop the image, simply drag the handles.

The Big Box of Art has 25 CDs for your use. When you search for the images you use Keywords, Type and Category.

Big Box of Art's Image Catalog

The Image Catalog gives you a thumbnail overview of several image types included in The Big Box of Art. Use it to supplement your searches when looking for the perfect image.

Image Catalog

Photo-Objects

Agriculture & industry
Architecture
Business, commerce & trade
Food & beverage
Holidays & special occasions
House & home
Lifestyles & cultures
Nature
People
Religion, myth & fantasy
Science & technology
Signs & symbols
Social issues & government
Sports & leisure

Pro Comments

You receive both a Big Box of Art User Guide and Image Catalog in paper form (hardcopy). No missing manual here.

You receive both a Big Box of Art's Photo-Objects and Big Box of Art's PhotoFonts both worth the price of any single program.

The Big Box of Art's Export Assistant gives you several choices for exporting and saving to various formats. You can choice TIFF with Transparency, GIF with Transparency, JPEG, JPEG Progressive, Mac Pic and Windows Bitmap.

Con Comments

Missing are programs that come with the Windows versions: Greeting Card Creator and CD Design Creator.

Final Notes

The Big Box of Art for Macintosh collection includes 10,000 Photo-Objects, 110,000 vector clip art images and 10,000 raster illustrations. Plus you receive 20,000 color photos, 10,000 black and white photos and 2,000 textured photos. In the graphics portion of the program you receive 26,000 Web graphics, 25,000 web images, 1,500 animations and 500 PhotoFont textures. Also, The Big Box of Art for Macintosh includes a 750 page image catalog.

Added Bonus. One of best programs you can use is Big Box of Art's PhotoFont Maker. With this amazing program you can fill in fonts with photo realistic textures. Do as the professional designers do. Now, you can make your headlines come alive with graphics, texture and scenic sunsets with Big Box of Art's PhotoFonts.

My experience using Hemera Big Box of Art. I use Big Box of Art's PhotoFonts for my ...website. The stars and stripes of the American Flag for the ARIE Foundation letters sets the tone for donations of stamps and sports cards for veterans in VA hospitals though out the United States.

I was in a bind. A client wanted a big tent for their ad. Another client wanted a photo of an older woman for their ad. Another needed a family in their ad. These clients will not pay for royalty-free images that cost too expensive and since it's my freshman year of owning my own communications/design firm, I don't have an extensive library of stock image CD's. I had to think quick...where can I find a bundle of CD's with many images that is available for the new MAC OS X?

The answer is Hemera's "The Big Box of Art" 215K which has been upgraded for OS X use. The software installed like a charm and like most Hemera products, will install the image thumbnails and type a word and wala...images will come up pertaining to the type of theme you are looking for.

Already, this program is a steal for the price they are selling it for. It's currently one of the few image/graphic CD's available for the new MAC OS and user friendly. This software contains many graphics and around 10,000 photo objects. Some of you are wondering why does the PC version have more than the MAC version and is much cheaper. Well, if you compare the two...give and take, the MAC has more for the photo-objects side, the PC has more towards the vector graphics/clip art side (like around 100K+ more) and it's a lot cheaper compared to the MAC version. But I'm guessing it's because Hemera released the new version for the PC containing 615K and I can only hope that a MAC version will be released containing this much.

Anyway, before I end this review. It's a worth addition to your design tools and remember that the photos are not hi-res. They are from 600x600 photos but you can save them 300DPI and on bigger projects, you can save the image as a PNG which you can then output as a EPS on your desktop publishing program and then distill it later.

Anyway, this software saves time and money and designers who moved on to the new OS X, this baby is a must buy!

IT's not USB 2.0, with the same amount of money you can buy a USB 2.0 Hub that will work better.

Not Recomended.

Don't buy this! I used this on a Mac. It worked OK when I just had a couple of devices on it, but when I added a Wi-Fi USB adapter, it caused frequent computer crashes on startup, loss of Internet connection, and freezing of my mouse. I thought it was the adapter's fault, but after reading the reviews here, I bought a D-Link USB hub to replace it. Haven't had a problem since!

This worked fine for over a year (unpowered) and then one day it just stopped. It hasn't worked since. The LEDs don't even light up. I tried plugging it in (the adapter this comes with is huge and very heavy and unwieldy), but that didn't work either. I'm going to switch to a different brand and a powered hub. This is the only Belkin product I've ever had a bad experience with. I would definitely not buy another Belkin USB hub.