ACDSee 9 Photo Manager Review
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Editors Rating:
Supported OS: Windows |
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+ The program does a tremendous amount of background processing and is constantly cataloguing and indexing your images. Some of great features ACDSee 9 offers are: PDF "photo albums", highly configurable contact sheets, exportable file indexes and lists, descript.ion generation, HTML photo albums, simple slide shows. The cool thing about Photo Manager is that it shows the file tree like in Windows Explorer! It also finds duplicate files & helps sort & organize them out.
- 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. 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. ACDSee is extremely slow with a large database. De-selecting the font extensions did not restore the original associations to Windows Font Viewer so you have to do that manually. |
By: Boris Zegarac
Date: July 02, 2007 |
ACDSee 9 is powerful photo software which will enable you to acquire, improve, manage, publish, and divide your photograph in a wink. 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.
The management of your images is done very easily thanks to functionalities making it possible to see all the images stored on your computer at the same time, even if those are in different files. In addition, the software recognizes formats RAW of the principal manufacturers of numerical cameras (Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus and Minolta). You can thus visualize these photographs on your computer in their original format.
Moreover, the module of acquisition of the software will recognize instantaneously the photographs contained in your numerical apparatus or your mobile telephone, and will be able to import them without more difficulty. You will be able to even control, since the software space remaining on the memory board of your apparatus. Of course, as very good software of final improvement of image which is respected, ACDSee proposes the whole of the traditional tools for graphic treatment (red-eye effect, attenuation of the noise, luminosity, saturation of the colors, rotation…) and supports 40 different formats of file in reading (of which format JPEG 2000) and 10 in conversion.
PDF "photo albums, highly configurable contact sheets, exportable file indexes and lists, description generation, HTML photo albums, simple slide shows, these are all great features we 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.
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 examining 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 grammas’ 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.
ACDSee 9 also makes it possible to go until the end graphic work thanks to functionalities of division of the particularly advanced images. For example, the SendPix service enables you to store free your albums photographs in line and to decide which will be authorized to come to see them. SendPix is now compatible also with the portable telephones. You will be able also to engrave very easily CD of your photographs or to create presentations in PDF files or Flash. In short, this software really enables you to sweep all the stages of the treatment of the photographs of their acquisition to their edition.
Stability isn't bad, but it could be better. The program doesn't appear to crash during heavy use (in the middle of something important, for example), but we have received the occasional "Unexpected error" shutdown notice shortly after attempting to close the program. Either way, our data has never been compromised due to a crash, and even if a problem came up, ACDSee includes strong database optimizing and repair tools to get things back up and running.
It is a very powerful, flexible tool and after our ACDSee 9 Review we keep discovering new features and uses for it, and we will publish them in our ACDSee Tips & Tricks section. We highly recommend ACDSee Photo Manager if you work with a lot of photos or digital scrapbooking supplies.
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