ACDSee 10 Photo Manager

List Price: $49.99

Features:

• Instant Viewing
• Get organized with ACDSee
• Correct and enhance your photos
• Share your favorite photos
• Make home printing a breeze

Customer Reviews:

Great product, but lacking even the most basic documenation [Posted on 2007-12-27]
I used ACDSee 4.0 as my photo manager for many years. Friends told me I needed to move over to Adobe Photoshop Elements, which I did. After many months I gave up on Photoshop (great programs, but too complicated, for me anyway, basic photo management)and upgraded to ACDSee 10. It loads fast, is not a system hog, and offers much better control storing photos. Not knocking Photoshop, but ACDSee meets my needs and works better for me that Photoshop.
One major disappointment was the software didn't even come with a "Quick-Start" guide or any type of documentation. Going to have to print out the PDF User Guide found on their web site.
BL

Great photo/media management tool [Posted on 2007-12-28]
I used ACD 6.0 for years to organize my pictures. I collect artwork online as well as taking digital pictures and am given new items constantly. After being on the 'net 10 years, I have hundreds of thousands of media files in all manner of formats, from .jpg to .gif to .tga, Photoshop files, bitmaps and a host of scarcer image formats. I wanted a database that would not only help me organize them all, but also have the capability of opening, editing and displaying files without having to find or open the program that originally created them. ACD 10 does all that and more. It even lets you include--and play--video and MP3 files that are archived with your photo media. So, if you store mixed media by theme (holiday, vacation 2007, comics, etc.), ACD10 will let you see and organize them all. They are adding new file formats all the time, so you don't have to convert photo CDs to other formats or keep a host of proprietary (and often annoying) photo or digital camera viewer appliations around. ACD 10 covers them all and does a better job of it.

IMPORTANT: I had a very hard time learning to edit photos using Microsoft Digital Image or Photoshop; ACD 10 has a MUCH better photo editing feature that produces the same professional results without all the hassle of editing layers, or nightmarish menu options within menu options within menu options... I want an easy, intuitive, professional-looking photo editor, not an endless puzzle of unhelpful help menus! ACD 10 gave that to me.

ALSO IMPORTANT: if you find yourself getting the same picture over and over, or have the same images stored under multiple names in multiple folders on your PC, the "eliminate duplicates" tool is easy and invaluable--worth the price of the whole program.

You can get ACD 10 free on trial direct (www.acdsee.com). Give it a try, see for yourself, then buy the CD-ROM from Amazon at their lower price. Your hard drive will thank you for it. ^.^

Abandoned Paint Shop Pro users at version 6! [Posted on 2008-01-08]
Could be a great organizer had ACDSee realized that Paint Shop Pro has doubled in 8 years to version 12. Should you have any inventory of PSP version 8+ images (".pspimage"), ACDSee 10 (build 238) will dump you back to the desktop without any warning or error message when you cursor over a PSP 8+ thumbnail. Utilizing the catalog feature of the application, results in the same situation when a PSP image is encountered. With no stated fix in the works, ACDSee's work-a-round is to disable the PSP file handling plugin, resulting in NO thumbnail or viewing at all, just a generic PSP file icon.

Very good photo manager, also good for quick edits [Posted on 2008-05-03]
I've been a long time user of Photoshop Elements which I have grown to like as a photo editor. The organiser in Elements, however, drives me to despair.
I have been using the highly rated 'Faststone' image viewer (which I donated to) and which is a good piece of software, but somehow it didn't quite fit the bill. Fastsone is 'Windows Explorer for photos', and it's excellent at that, however it's not a photo manager. Photoshop Organiser? Well, I can't get it to work properly, it hogs resources, and generally tries to take control of your PC like only Adobe knows how to do.

Half a dozen trial downloads later, and I've settled on ACDSee 10. Why? Well the interface is very clean; it offers a powerful range of features which reveal themselves as you explore the software; it's fast; it's ITPC (photo tagging) compatible, and the editor provides a very useful range of adjustments for photo correction.

Why not 5 stars? In my view this is the best of the bunch of this type of software, but other packages offer features, which if ACDSee offered would make it the 'real deal'. Faststone's slideshow feature is better; Picassa is great for slideshows and its timeline, oh and ACDSee costs $40 (if you use the widely available online coupons).

If you are browsing this wondering whether to buy ACDSee, then I must assume you are aware of the free alternatives. That being the case, and you are willing to pay for a photo manager, then checking out the trial of ACDSee is a must - nothing else beats it in my view (but it's still only 4 *).

Unresolved glitches [Posted on 2008-05-09]
I've bought ACDSee 5, 6, 7 and 9. Version 5 was, and still is , the most reliable. I gave up on the newer versions ( which had the bad habit of freezing the computer) and went back to the old version. Coupled with Photoshop, it is a great tool, which I use frequently. Their support was responsive, but the solutions presented never solved my problem.
Hope they get it right with the newest version. I'd love to have it then.

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