Pros & Cons
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- All-in-one media solution.
- Handsome interface.
- Extensible with plugins for Blu-ray playing, face detection, and more.
- Attractive slideshows.
- Syncing for Android devices.
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- Long installation.
- Too many functions require purchasing an add-on.
Nero Kwik Media Specs
| Free: | Yes |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows 7 |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Personal |
Setup and Interface
Kwik is not the quickest of downloads, at 174MB, so don't expect to be up and running within seconds. The installer runs through multiple sub-setup processes and tries to get you to install a toolbar too, which I can't fault in a free app. By comparison, Picasa takes a fraction of the time to install, as does iTunes, and unlike those, Kwik requires a reboot.
When you start up Kwik, it first shows a narrow filmstrip-like window populated with thumbnails of your own photos and videos. You then get an interface that looks strikingly like the MediaHub component of Nero Multimedia Suite, except the main Kwik window area starts out showing four categories of link choices: Media Library, Enjoy Your Media, Be Creative, and Burn & Copy Disc. The first is all about importing, the second lets you make a slideshow, playlist or upload to the Web. Enjoy lets you view and edit photos and play audio and videos. Without buying an add-on, the only burning you can do is music to CDs. Burn & Copy Disc is self-explanatory.
The start page is a fairly sparse arrangement of text links, but once you get into the library and detail views, it's a clear, good-looking interface. Generous use of tooltips points out how to perform common tasks. I could add any type of media to my Favorites (though the point products let you apply more granular star ratings). In all, though, Kwik doesn't really offer any huge UI advances over what you'll find in iTunes, Picasa, or Windows Media Player.
Importing Media
Kwik can watch folders and automatically add to its libraries any new media files that appear in them. This includes Window 7 libraries, which a lot of programs don't know how to deal with. From the Start Page, you can also choose "Import files from a device" but this just brings up the normal library view. You're expected to know to click on the sources below the three library entries (Music, Photos, Videos) and playlists—Optical Discs and Devices. Clicking on either of these two actually offers import options. Checkboxes let you choose to import Music, Photos, and Videos. But beyond that, you don't get any choices about where to import to, file naming or, in the case of photos, tagging.
I tested the software's claims about syncing Android phones to iTunes libraries with a Samsung Galaxy S phone after failing to get a Huawei Ascend recognized. You need the $4.99 MoveIt plugin, and you also have to make sure the phone is in USB storage mode—but not USB debugging mode. Once I got the phone connected, recognized, and in the right mode, an entry for it appeared in the Devices left panel, and clicking this brought up a page showing a thumbnail image of the phone along with a bar indicating its memory usage between music, photos, video, and other.
Prominent Sync and Sync Options buttons appear on the phone's page, and the latter brought up tabs for Playlists and Albums, but the checkbox for All Albums was grayed out. I liked how Kwik let me simply drag albums to the phone's left-panel entry. You can also sync Android phones with Windows Media Player, but Kwik does make the process a bit clearer. I should note that I had no problem getting an iPhone to show up in Kwik, but it makes more sense to use iTunes, for firmware updates and more.
Music
Kwik's Music view shows cover art thumbnails for any music it finds in your watched folders and added to the library. You can easily play, add to a playlist, or burn any checked item here. Creating playlists is a snap, and you can drag and drop songs onto a playlist's entry in the left panel to add them. You can use random or repeat mode, but there's nothing comparable to iTunes' Genius playlists.
I wish I could simply remove something from the Kwik catalog as I can in iTunes and Windows Media Player, rather than having to delete from disk. iTunes and Windows Media Player also have the advantage of being able to play Internet radio, as well as stream music from other local computers' playlists.
Photos
Kwik displays a stack view of your photo folders, but it doesn't let you "skim" through them the way iPhoto does. You can order the view by folder, year, month, day or recent. When you open a picture, buttons at the bottom quickly get you to the Auto Enhance, rotation, and crop tools. clicking on the modify icon at the bottom opens a palette that offers Auto fixes for exposure, color, "enhance," and red eye removal. Two more tabs on this palette let you adjust basics with sliders for things like brightness, backlight, straightening, color temperature, and saturation. The straightening tool was less precise than most others I use, with jerky motions. There's no Fill Light slider like Picasa's, which is very useful.
Hovering the mouse over an effect thumbnail, which displays your image with the effect applied, previews the chosen effect in the main large image view, too. Kwik offers just eight effects, including sepia, B&W, antique, vignette, blur, and sharpen. Some of these increase the effect each time you click on the thumbnail, but there's no way to finely adjust an effect like sharpening. I have to give kudos to the Red-eye removal tool: A button click fixed all eight red eyes in my test image.
Windows Live Photo Gallery and iPhoto both include excellent face-recognition feature, and, while Nero's 99 cent price for the feature isn't onerous, Windows Live Photo Gallery saves you the purchase, download, and install processes for the plugin. Kwik's Faces add-on starts working as soon as you install it, with pulsating dots appearing under a newly added Faces section in the Library's left panel. You can create groups within this, for family and the like. With the plug-in installed Photo pages get an Add Name to Face choice, with boxes surrounding found faces. But after naming those, another box appeared where there was no face. The app did a decent job recommending faces to add to a name.
Playing basic slideshows with background music is a one-button-press affair in Kwik, if you've selected a photo folder, but you can go all out and create a more customized slideshows for sharing, using themes and changing slide duration. Two extra free theme packs are available for download, and two more for $8 each; the themes are pretty professional and attractive, and come with their music, but you can override that an use your own.
Video
Nero Kwik Media did a satisfactory job organizing and playing video, offering fast forward and back but not slow motion, as Windows Media Player does. One video stopped playing, though, and a message box popped up saying I had to buy the $4.99 Nero Kwik Play app to continue watching. You can watch in full screen or original size and upload to video sites, but there are no enhancements like Windows Media Player's brightness and contrast settings.
Burning and Sharing
To burn anything other than music CDs (which you can also do for free in iTunes and Windows Media Player), you need to install the Nero Kwik Burn add-on from the app store (luckily discounted to free from $4.99), which adds DVD burning. Windows DVD Maker also lets you format movies for burning DVDs free. AVCHD burning (which lets you watch HD video on a Blu-ray player without expensive Blu-ray discs) isn't supported, and when you try, you're forwarded to an upsell Web page for
Kwik can directly upload video to YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and its own My Nero community site. The process is straightforward, and went without a glitch for YouTube, but I wasn't given the usual "see video online" when it finished, and Kwik wouldn't send a .MOV file to Facebook or Flickr; instead showing a message saying "This format is not supported by this community." I'd have hoped the software could convert the video to an acceptable format, and, in fact, the Facebook site itself accepted the file for upload.
Do You Need an All-in-One Media Manager?
Nero Kwik Media's main strength may be that it combines music, photo, and video functions in one app. Android users who want to easily get their iPod libraries onto their new phones may also welcome Kwik. But with so many features coming only as extra-cost items though, I almost wish they'd charged some money, say $15, and included commonly needed capabilities. For photo organizing and fixing, you're probably better off with Google Picasa. For music, you'll get more options in iTunes, and Windows Media Player organizes and plays music and videos just as well. But some consumers may prefer the simplicity of the single entry point that Kwik Media offers, along with its easy disc burning and online sharing.
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Final Thoughts
Nero Kwik Media
Nero Kwik Media offers a single entry point for your digital photo, music, and video collections, but you can to better with more targeted apps for each?Picasa or Windows Live Photos Gallery for photos, and Windows Media Player or iTunes for enjoying music and video. Those also let you do more without requiring the purchase of separate plug-ins, as Kwik does.