If you faint with terror at the prospect of organising a few family photos, how does the thought of arranging 50,000 into a digital "super album" strike you? Sony’s HDMS-S1D accepts photos from various sources, tracks them and enables slideshow displays on your HD TV.

Sony's HDMS-S1D: stylish, living room-friendly look

Essentially, the HDMS-S1D is an 80GB external hard drive, and content can be loaded on via CD, DVD, a host of memory card formats, USB or over a wired network connection. A remote control then assumes the photo-management role, once all your happy snaps are on this humongous... er... black box.

Photos are arranged into customisable folders, such as ‘The day we bought our HDMS-S1D’, and individual images can be edited with the remote control in a Photoshop-esque application. Sony claims bundled face detection and event clustering technology will help users make photo scrapbooks based on common themes, such as children. There are 30 pre-loaded music tracks to accompany your slideshows. However, only five of your own songs can be added, which is pretty limited.

A good range of connectors are built in

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The HDMI port and component-video connectors means snaps can be shown on your HD display, but there are s-video and composite-video for folks with older, standard-definition tellies.

A printer can be connected to the device or your memories can be offloaded onto other folks' digital photo albums via the writable CD/DVD drive.

The HDMS-S1D is available in the US this month for $400 (£200/€225), but Sony’s not yet announced a European launch.