ACDSee 9 Photo Manager Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)ACDSee photo management absolutely beats most (if not all?) of the photo management utilities typically shipped with digital cameras, hands down. However, free applications such as irfanview are really beginning to come together where this program is falling apart--namely ease of use and functionality.
ACDSee has become a feature monster. The program does a tremendous amount of background processing and is constantly cataloguing and indexing your images. This is a problem if you work with a large number of new images on a regular basis. There is no obvious way to stop the database from cataloguing everything it encounters, and as time goes on this too easily corrupted database brings the program to its knees. The number of system errors and program crashes I've encountered with version 9 is absolutely pathetic for such an established name in this business. Multimedia is not handled well, best advice if you have an assortment of media types is to turn video previews OFF and just leave multimedia functionality alone.
PDF "photo albums", highly configurable contact sheets, exportable file indexes and lists, descript.ion generation, HTML photo albums, simple slide shows, these are all great features I love to use with ACDSee. They don't seem to hinder normal operations of the browser so no harm done. The ease of using the conversion tools and lossless JPEG operations, as well as the excellent EXIF tools and batch renaming by EXIF data also just can't be beat. The interface is very flexible and anything can go just about anywhere, or go away, also a huge plus. The program has definite qualities.
ACDSee needs to scale down the browsing app a LOT and get back to basics. I don't need a complex database when I'm rotating and deleting a thousand images I won't likely need again and using the browser to examinine EXIF data. I resent the fact that the search feature has become so highly dependent on building this consumer-oriented proprietary database (how many stars did you give your image and was it a pretty picture of puppies or babies or gramma's birthday?) it is barely functional for raw file searches. I have learned not to trust centralized absolute-file-location-dependent databases, particularly when tied to specific applications. I prefer organizing by files and folders and maintaining flexibility, and this program no longer caters to my methods. Unfortunately basic file management (cut/copy/paste) through ACDSee is extremely slow with a large database, but use any other app to move or rename a file and your database info relative to those images is orphaned and lost.
(Nitpicking: The font viewer needs work, it would be very useful if it could be configured to display characters other than "FONT". Unfortunately de-selecting the font extensions did not restore the original associations to Windows Font Viewer so I had to do that manually. I'd also really like it if ACDSee didn't keep reminding me of other "great ACDSee products", I've clicked most of the "do not show this again" boxes but still see things from time to time.)
For basic image browsing and pre-photoshop operations such as organization, elimination, and lossless exif rotation I have almost fully converted to irfanview. Because of the instability as your database grows, the constant indexing and cataloguing (think infinitely spinning hourglasses and delayed blank file listings when you'd rather just be viewing images) add all the junk features pros don't need and can't remove--and this has become a potentially annoying application.


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