PC-Review Online : Reviews : Graphics : ACDSee Pro 8.0

With digital cameras being ever more affordable and popular the number of digital camera images that we have on our computer is growing at leaps and bounds, before you get to the point you have so many images that cataloging and organizing them becomes the equivalent to building the Hoover Damn with a tooth pick and sand pale you need to choose your image management program and start putting it to use. This is even more critical if you plan to be able to find the images you want when you want them.

Now if you have looked at the image management, catalog and organizing programs on the market you have I am sure noticed there are lot of options to choose from. Options from freeware and shareware to low cost and high cost options to choose from, choosing an image management program is not an easy task. You need to look at the features you need and want, decide what kind of interface you want and then look at the programs that meet these requirements and finally decide if any of them is something you can live with. You really need to pick your program and make it one you plan to stick with. Why? Because for all intense and purposes you aren’t going to be able to easily switch programs later. By the time you get through cataloging, keywording, tagging, and everything else required for good image management you aren’t going to want to waste time doing it all over again in another program and since these programs don’t import the information from one another that is exactly what you have to do. So decide on your program now and stick with it.

I want to tell you about ACDSee 8.0 Pro. This is my top choice for image management it is in the mid-price area. ACDSee has been around for many years; in fact it was one of the first image management programs on the market. Some people feel that ACDSee is past its prime basically because they feel too many non-critical features have been added and the program in general has become bloated, slow and harder to use. I disagree. I think ACDSee is the most feature complete of the image management programs you can get and compared to other similar programs it is faster, more stable and more useful.

Besides being able to catalog and organize your images, ACDSee also lets you view and manage other types of files too including video, TrueType fonts, vector images like EPS, WMF, etc. It also has basic image editing features so you can crop, straighten, adjust color and exposure and even apply special effects like oil painting and sepia. It can backup to CD and DVD, it can create slideshows and HTML web page galleries, it can print contact sheets, it can do very sophisticated batching renaming and format conversion. It can also find duplicate files for you so that you can be sure you are only using the amount of hard disk space you need and not wasting it on duplicates of the same image.

The ACDSee Pro interface is clean and easy to use. In fact all of the advanced features are easy to use, for example you have a lot of options and control over batch renaming but the features and how it works is presented in an easy to use wizard style interface that walks you through the process.

The Pro version of ACDSee is a fairly new offering having come out in late 2005. There are some significant differences between the standard and Pro versions of ACDSee. Which version you choose depends on how much you want to spend and whether or not you need the extra and enhanced features in ACDSee Pro. Since we are dealing with the Pro version for this review I have included a list of not only the standard features but the features that are either not found in the standard version of ACDSee or have been enhanced in ACDSee Pro, you can find this list in the features section of this review.

Another area of digital image management that is becoming ever more popular and important is the handling and processing of digital camera RAW files. ACDSee Pro can do this as well and it supports a wide range of the most popular RAW formats. However, I can’t honestly say I like the processing features in ACDSee Pro. They just aren’t sophisticated enough, not like what is available in Adobe Photoshop CS, Pixmantec RAW Shooter Premium, etc. So while I use ACDSee Pro to manage and catalog and organize my RAW files I use a third party product to process them. The RAW processing in ACDSee is like the image editing section. It works, but it comes across as a little I guess juvenile, the interface and features just aren’t as nifty and snazzy as they could and should be. With luck this will be improved as ACDSee Pro is updated.

While I have looked at other image cataloging programs most of them have come and gone for me. The only one I do keep installed on my computer is ACDSee and now ACDSee Pro. I highly recommend that if your looking for a great image management package that you download the trial for either version of ACDSee and give it a test spin.