12,000 Clip Art Reviewer's Comments

Even though the low price is tempting, we don't recommend Cosmi's 12,000 Clip Art. There are other choices that will do a far better job for not much more money, such as our #4 pick, Art Explosion 300,000.

Clip Art Variety:  

12,000 Clip Art is missing several vital features. The program doesn't offer these common file formats: JPEG, WMF, and PNG. There are no vector illustrations, symbols, web graphics or animated gifs available. Cosmi also doesn't provide a printed catalog. But 12,000 Clip Art does include basic clip art images, photographs and sounds.

A note on installation—after installing 12,000 Clip Art and removing the DVD, the program would not run. We figured out that the DVD had to be inserted for the program to work, but were surprised that no error message appeared saying so.

Search Capabilities:  

12,000 Clip Art doesn't offer any quality search capabilities. The browser doesn't allow you to preview different types of clip art and then navigate to a specific section. Instead, you must choose a category first, and then search within that category. We prefer clip art that allows you to search the entire library, like our #2 pick, The Big Box of Art 1 Million.

Also, 12,000 Clip Art has no home screen and no navigation buttons, just a box where you can type in a search word and we couldn't get this tool to work properly. We tried to find generic images using basic keywords, but the software search tool didn't return any clip art.

Clip Art Quality:  

We found the quality of 12,000 clip art images adequate.

Customer Service:  

We tried to contact Cosmi several times; we visited their website and sent several emails but didn't receive a single response, not even in automated form. We gave up after four tries.

Summary:  

We don't recommend Cosmi's 12,000 Clip Art package due to limited selection, faulty navigation and non-existent customer service.