MetaCreations Painter has a very limited capability to import vector clipart. Like a lot of art programs, Painter has not relieved itself of its Mac origins and will only import Adobe Illustrator files (*.ai).  Most of the large consumer clipart packages use the Windows Metafile format (*.wmf) for vector clipart.  That means that vector clipart found in any other format has to be converted to Illustrator format before it can be brought into Painter. Corel MegaGallery is the only clipart package that has a capability to convert vector clipart to an Illustrator format.

Corel Gallery Magic is the program in MegaGallery that has to be used to access the vector clipart and convert it to a format that Painter can use. Since Corel uses its own proprietary format for storing its images, there's no other way to browse through the clipart images on the CD-ROM. Unfortunately, Gallery Magic is one of the poorest, most uninuitive programs that I have ever used. No matter what I try to do with this program, it manages to confound my efforts to accomplish the simplest tasks. I can follow the guidance in the manual step by step and the program does not do what the manual says it should.

There's also no easy way to get to a single image based on knowing the filename in Gallery Magic. The manual states that a file can be opened from within Gallery Magic by going to File/Open/All Files and typing the name of the file. This is supposed to open an album window with an icon of the file, but does not. Even if someone has found an image they want to use in manual, it's still necessary to open the gallery with all the images in that category and then scroll through the hundreds of images in the gallery to get to the file that's wanted.

I hoped that it would be possible to open the gallery I wanted and then use Search to get to the file I needed without having to visually locate it, but Search is absolutely useless because of the way it is implemented. To search for a file, it has to be highlighted! The only way to remotely use it the way it should be used is to click on the first file in the gallery, move the scroll bar all the way to the right, hold Shift and click on the last file so that all the files are highlighted. Even then, there's no definition of the different file types of search (label, keyword, description, notes, link-name, and link-path). Label is the filename and has to be exact (such as ouch!.cmx).  Keywords aren't well annotated.  A search in the Christmas album for Santa resulted in only seven hits even though there are probably about a hundred images of Santa Claus in the album.

Go to the Corel Gallery Magic tutorial.