This is a beloved treasure of 120 years of knowledge and history, and a very valuable reference for the libraries. However, there are a few points that ought to be noted:

*Reported bugs are still waiting to be fixed as of July 16th, 2010. Examples are:
-The Apr 1953 issue displays the cover of Apr 1953 but the content of Apr 1954. The Apr 1953 issue is completely missing.
-In the Jul 1960 issue, the first advertising page is missing and replaced by a duplicated page 11.
-2 pages are reported missing from the Jan 1977 advertising section. The first is the nomination page and the second is half of two pages for Cadillac.
-In the Feb 1993 issue, pages 72-73 are missing and replaced by duplicated pages 78-79.
-The bottom line of photo caption on page 125 of the Dec 2003 issue is partially cut-off.
-From 1991 to 2008, at least 30 maps are reported missing. Examples: The World War II double map supplement is missing in the Dec 1991 issue. The Jerusalem's Holy Ground map is missing in the Dec 2008 issue.
It doesn't seem like the CNG has any quality control. It solely relies on customer feedbacks to be aware of these missing items. The Complete National Geographic is still incomplete with such bugs existing.

*National Geographic announced in their press release dated 10/13/2009 that "The Complete National Geographic" users will be able to add to their archive after purchasing the DVD-ROM or hard drive product by downloading annual updates on a subscription basis from [...]. This is a must-have, but not yet available, if you want to expand your assets in the future by adding recent NGM issues to the package.

*The Complete National Geographic contains all National Geographic Magazine issues published through December 2008. Content updates for The Complete National Geographic will be available after the print editions of the previous year have been published. An update for the 2009 issues of National Geographic Magazine for The Complete National Geographic will be available for purchase and download via the Internet in the spring of 2010 - Not happened yet as of summer of 2010.

*Updates need to be installed to add missing pages of Apr 1913, Dec 1930, Mar 1950, Sep 1960, Aug 1970, and Jul 1979 issues to the collection. However, updates have to be downloaded through Auto Updates or "Check For Updates Now"; there isn't an independent update installer for archive and repeat installation.

*Either the digital magnifier that comes with the software or the maximum zoom needs to be used to clearly read the texts on your monitor. Don't expect a .pdf ASCII text resolution of the scanned pages. The resolution of the text seems to improve a bit after Adobe AIR Runtime version 1.5.3.9130 is installed.

*The patch (revision 1.26) to copy CNG content to local drive was released for Windows on January 31, 2010. It takes many hours to copy the 6 DVDs to the hard drive.

I loaded mine to my hard drive and love not having to take the DVDs in and out. It took over two hours per DVD to load, but was worth it. You just have to copy them from the DVD to a very specific folder on your hard drive. The directions are in the last of these FAQs in this link to the CNG FAQ page:

[...]

(If Amazon doesn't allow this link here, check one of my responses below this review -- I'll include it there too and maybe it can stay there.)

One of the biggest negatives with this set is that the sideways pictures can't rotate, making them hard to read and enjoy. And there are many such pictures. Hopefully they will come up with an upgrade soon to fix this, as they have received many queries about this.

Although there are some negatives, overall, I am very happy with this set.

The huge plus is you get every issue of National Geographic in a relatively easily readable format when you use the easy-to-use magnifying and dragging features. If you have a 24" monitor, it's pretty readable as is. With magnified reading, when you go to the next page, it resets back to zero magnification, and you have to re-magnify it. But it's fairly easy -- all you have to do is double click on the page, and it magnifies, and you can drag the text and pictures around as needed.


They even include all of the advertisements, which they could have easily decided to omit. (It's fun to look at the ads from long ago. For example, in the April 1916 issue, focusing on the national parks, there's an ad for newly established Cascade National Park, placed by Great Northern Railroad, reminiscent of the days when railroads affiliated themselves with different parks, to boost travel.)

It prints out beautifully, and there is no readability problem with printouts.

There is a handy readlist feature, where you can create your own readlists (very easily done) or look at readlists that the editors have prepared. There are approximately 33 of these already created readlists, covering such things as various editors' favorites, National Parks, The Universe, The Untamed, etc. Just scanning through these articles, it looks like these lists are pretty good and I see a lot of things I want to read.

One problem with these readlists is that they don't give the date of the article. You see something focusing on, say India, and you have no idea if it is from 1915 or 2005. That makes a big difference to me insofar as my interest. They should include the date of the issue in these readlists. When I create my own lists I plan on always including the date.

All in all, I am happy with this set, and would buy again, since it seems to be the best way to get all of national Geographic, short of buying all of the actual magazines for thousands of dollars.

I've been playing around with this latest version of the "Complete National Geographic" and have a few thoughts to share.

I own one of the previous sets on CD-ROM. That set had a couple significant problems: You couldn't read the text of the articles, and all the magazines were scanned badly.

This set has solved the readability and resolution problems, but has introduced a few of its own.

The earlier issues of the magazine have their photographs printed vertically so that the whole height of the page was used to display landscape photographs. With the magazine, and the earlier set on CD-ROM, you could rotate the pictures on their side and enjoy the whole photo blown up to full, (although limited), resolution. This set has no such feature, so you have to tip your head to view the photo and read the caption, and worse still, the photo can be displayed no wider than your monitor is tall. You can zoom in on the picture for a better look, but it would have been nice to be able to rotate the pages so you could get a full screen view.

Also, the search function is a sorry joke on this set. It uses these funky dials to select your date range, (what is wrong with pull downs I ask?), so it is more difficult to select an exact date range. Also, when you get your results they are displayed in this "carousel" format with the newest results first and the oldest rotating off into the distance. What is wrong with a simple list view and a scroll bar???

As was mentioned in an earlier review, these search results are truncated, so you know nothing about the date, or the key words, or anything about the details of the results. A good search function is kinda important for a collection spanning 120 years, and this one is close to worthless.

Ah, just remembered something else about the search function. When you search for a particular brand name in the advertisements, clicking on the result takes you to the cover of the issue the ad is in rather than the exact page. Very annoying!

So, all in all, better than the old set in one very important way, the scans seem much improved, but the interface needs some serious work.

I did notice that when I checked for updates it had already gone from version 1.12 to 1.15 in the short time since release. Maybe they will see the light and invest some effort into improving the interface. They have already got my money though, so I won't be holding my breath.

Overall, I am very impressed and pleased with this set. There are a few minor things that bother me, however, things that are not explained and given workarounds for due to there only being a 1-sheet program installation page.

1. There is no instuctions booklet provided in the box. There is an onscreen FAQ of sorts, but it doesn't begin to cover everything you need to know, making a booklet a must-have.

2. Many pages have their photographs oriented and displayed vertically onscreen. If a function exists on the installation disc to make them appear horizontally side-by-side I can't find it. Having to turn my head sideways to view these vertical pictures/read the text every so often is sure hard on my neck! LOL

2. No explanation (that I can find) is available on how to access/display the maps.

3. As was mentioned previously in this thread, each magazine page must be zoomed manually since there's no option to lock the screen at a given magnification for as long as it's needed. This is a programming oversight that should have been addressed, prior to this shipping out to retail.

All in all, owning this Nat-Geo set is proving to be a fascinating and worthwhile trip down memory lane. It's a lot of fun, revisiting all of the old Nat-Geo issues I remember reading (and used to collect) as a kid back there in the 1950s-60s.

Of all the ways to package an archive of printed material, this is one of the worst. It is either a completely amateur job or a serious attempt at the copyright holders to make it as painful as possible for anyone to access the material. The user interface is absolutely abysmal. No browser-like interface that you find on quality products like Encarta here; you can only move forward. And even on a high-end system (mine is an i7 3.6ghz with 8gb memory), the interface runs like a slug. They apparently tried to make the thumbnails work like Apple OSX's dock but with horrible results. The theme, which you can't change, is everything's black. If your eyes aren't very good then this is going to be a beast to deal with because the black buttons (on black background) are so small and the text on them not even white that they can barely be read, even with my good eyes. The buttons don't depress either, and the disabled buttons look almost identical to enabled buttons. Combined with the sluggish interface, you can't really tell if clicking is doing anything. Worse still is the search. The designers apparently felt that having a stack of magazines in front of you is the ideal interface because this search stinks. Trying to locate a map of mountains of Greece turned up a small result set of articles that had nothing to do with either Greece or mountains. But the biggest insult is the scan quality. This is where you really had to stand back and say, yes, this is truly an amateur job. Scans are not color adjusted, scanner artifacts are rife and they apparently decided not to scan high and then downsample. As a result the text is hard to read, and their stupid enhance text feature (to make up for the poor scanning job) doesn't help a whole lot. This was basically wasted money because it's so difficult to use. I've heard NG did a much worse job with earlier versions so I guess they are improving. They are still a long way off from having a good product though.

I must say that my excitement upon seeing this product, and its pricetag, was such that my wife didn't even bother arguing with me when I told her that I must get this.

After I have received it, well, I'm still happy that I own it, but it has been somewhat disappointing.

Instead of rambling, I'll just write it in bullet form, disappointments first:
1. As of Dec. 19, 2009, no HDD install
It's quite slow, and having it read from the DVD compounds this. The only way around it is to copy them on your user-specific folder, which means that if you use a computer with more than one account, you'll need 50GBs of space per user if you want all of them to access it from the HDD. The more tedious solution is to copy all the images on your harddrive and use a virtual DVD to load all the discs, but that is still awkward.

2. Slow
I can understand if the images are slow to load, or if the queries are slow due to the vast data, but I just don't understand why the geographic browser is slow on a computer that has more than one CPU.

3. Picture quality
I understand the reasoning behind loading not-so-great pictures in order to prevent some from using them outright, but the quality is hideous to somebody who enjoys photography. It's nothing like something you'd expect in this decade - you can see jagged edges, jumps in tone, and everything else that screams that quality has been compromised for storage. I would've been perfectly happy with pictures that they put on the web, resized so that it won't be usable outside of the computer, but the pics look as if they were scanned 10 years ago.

Well, that's about it for disappointments, but #1 is a big big big disappointment since it's advertised as if it can be loaded to your HDD, and NG isn't the same if it doesn't have absolutely stunning pictures.

As for the often mentioned type size in articles, if you have a 24-inch monitor, it's not a problem at all. On my 24 inch LCD, the articles are slightly larger than lifesize when viewed full screen, and it's perfectly readable without any magnification. Pictures, on the other hand, are awkward - let's just say that the bonus DVD has better still shots than the scanned pictures inside.

Still, it's nice to have 120 years worth of NG at your grasp, complete with ads and pictures, and able to search it for articles or even pictures, if you can remember at least part of its caption.

As of December 2009 there are definitely ways to copy the DVDs to a hard drive so that the DVDs are not required to use the program.

If you install the software and use the update option in Preferences to install the latest update then you get an option to specify where the DVD data is stored, and you just need to copy the contents of the disk1-6 folders from each disk to that location. Note that this copy process is rather slow (if you have more than one DVD drive you can do more than one copy at the same time) and the data are stored in inividual image files for each page so it has to copy around 34,000 files per disk. Each file copy seems to cause the DVD drive to seek back and forth across the disk once, which means 34,000 seeks per disk which slows the process significantly (to over an hour per disk) and also might result in a significant amount of wear and tear on the DVD drive (this is speculation).

Note that you'll need 50GB of available disk space if you choose to install all the data to disk!

The developers are actively updating the program and the latest Mac version has a "copy everything to disk" feature which does the work for you, and the Windows version should have this same function enabled literally any day now. The web site to follow for the latest info is COMPLETENATGEO.

This version of the Complete National Geographic is *much* improved over the one from several years ago. The viewing application is a much nicer application, it scales the images to the size of the application window nicely, and the full two-page spread images are quite readable on a 24" 1920x1200 monitor.

Our local Costco has had a huge pile of these this holiday season, so I hope this review helps out some of the new purchasers looking for information about the product. If you haven't bought it yet, it's a great deal and an amazing wealth of information and imagery. Issues through (most of?) 2008 are included, and they say there will be an option in 2010 to buy the 2009 issues to add to your existing collection.

Highly recommended.

G.

I own the original Complete National Geographic from 1998, so purchased this for the additional 120 issues. I am glad I did because the quality and content of the magazine is still excellent. I am also able to read some past issues, in which the text was unreadable on the original.

The new interface is ok, but the searches just do not work for me. I always end up going to the online National Geographic Magazine Index to actually find ALL the results on a search.

Deducting 1 star because it will not run from hard drive with updates as of November 1, as advertised. The National Geographic support team is now saying the update should be available in December, but will it? National Geographic abandoned updates and user support with its original CNG. Regardless, well worth purchasing.

Note: this review is about the packaging and interface, not the content, which is beyond any rating.I had the first generation of NatGeo on CD, and I bought this. It is true that the interface is somewhat slicker. But the installation on a Mac was not very easy, and I put it all on a portable HDD. However, don't try to go too fast or it will crash, even on a fast machine with lots of RAM. The quality of the display is indeed much better than the first generation.

A big problem is that landscape pages cannot be rotated, so you must either rotate your monitor or your head to read them. Or print them. Sheesh, how could they let that through the released version? "This problem has been noted" and they're working on it. Why, oh why, does NGS pick these offbeat, proprietary interfaces and then change vendors every few years? Why couldn't they just put everything in PDF and be done with it?

Keeping my fingers crossed for a patch!

The information contained and having all pages of the National Geographic is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone.

The Big disappointment comes from the interface used to display the magazine.
1) slow - Distractingly so slow that each page turn is excruciatingly painful and it makes me wonder will i ever get there.
2) Photographed PDF images instead of text. - this is a huge pain on an entirely new level!!!
3) Text is not searchable because of the PDF images
4) Photographs become pixelated when zooming because of the PDF images
5) Text is near impossible to read with out being fatigued because of the old source text.
6) Zooming in is difficult to do and exploring the page is another exercise in frustration.

This software could be improved by providing just the pages in PDF form without the stupid software.
The software developers could have ran the magazine through google OCR to extract the text or use higher resolution photos.

Taking the time to extract the images is a necessity!!!