Customer Reviews

ACDSee Photo Manager 2009

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My wife and I saw a demo of this at a education industry trade show and very impressed on the overall photo management capabilities, they have a more sophisticated term called digital asset mgmt. I had photos in so many different folders and drives, especially our wedding photos. This program automatically identified them, helped us organize quickly into categories and help rate them in importance to us. The program looks identical to the windows operating system so our user experience was a breeze. The photo editing feature is good, but not great. We bought this for the management part and its worth every penny just for that. I highly recommend to anyone with alot of photos and who feel they are unorganized on their computer.

I've used ACDSee for years and recently upgraded to the 2009 version. I've always liked the features and especially the speed of the photo viewer and the general ease of use; I find it much better than Adobe Photoshop Organizer. It has all the great features I need, including batch resizing, batch conversion, batch assignment of EXIF information, tagging, sophisticated searching, a decent editor for basic editing, and flexible viewing options. The new version has a slicker interface and faster response.

Unfortunately, this version has some persistent bugs which, well, bug me. Sometimes when I launch ADCSee or am just doing normal operations, the application simply crashes on my. Even worse, when I try to import images from a CompactFlash card, the process almost invariably hang - the application freezes and will not respond and I have to kill it. This means I have to import using other programs, none of which are aw useful/flexible as ACDSee is... but they don't lock up.
I've reported this to ACD Systems technical support but I have not been able to get the problem resolved. I've gotten responses but they tend to be stock answers, not a real resolution.

I'm really torn on ACDSee. I've been using it since Windows 3, pre ACDSee 32. With each release it gets more bloated and slow and stupid, but still I download the trial to see if I can give up using ACDSee 5. I file bug reports and get back dumb responses. But I'm still using version 5 because it's better than the rest.

The upside is that unless you shell out for Adobe's Lightroom this is probably the best photo or picture manager. I've tried xnView, Irfan, etc, and none of them even come close to ACDSee's management capabilities.

On the downside, with each release ACDSee gets more bloated and slower and introduces more bugs, or at least different ones - the amount of crashing seems fairly constant. I've just been playing with ACDSee Photo Manager 2009, and it's literally more than an order of magnitude (10x) slower than ACDSee 5 when going into a new directory. It's crashed several times on me already. Probably due to the mandatory database stuff, which they've never been able to implement properly. Are they outsourcing this?

So to summarize: if you want to manage your photos or pictures on Windows and can't afford Adobe Lightroom (or Photoshop CS and its database) and you can deal with a large number of bugs and outright crashing, this is probably the best program.

Or you could just try xnView if you don't need the file management capabilities, or find a copy of ACDSee 5.

It's really a shame, I desperately want this program to get better after so many versions, but it just doesn't.

I had an old copy of ACDSee Photo Manager...Maybe one of the orginial ones....and I loved it. It did everything I needed done with photos. However it was a download and when my computer crashed a few weeks ago...lightening...I lost it as my backup on 3.5" disk was bad. So I researched and found it again!!!!!!!!!!! The newer version is much improved and I am delighted with it. I would have no other. Thanks guys!!!

Any categories you assign to your images are stored in ACDSee's proprietary database only. If you want to move that information to industry standard IPTC fields within the JPEG images, you have to do that manually. ACDSee 2009 does include GUI to transfer information to and from everywhere to everywhere (IPTC to database, database to EXIF, etc.) but to migrate to the industry standard IPTC, you have to buy Pro version!!

ACDSee CEO: Pro version is to offer professional features. It is not to offer industry standards like IPTC that should be there in the most basic version! You think locking people down to your product will "enhance" your profits, right? ONLY if a savvy user BUYS your product to BEGIN with!!! I was almost decided to buy ACDSee, but Alas! Glad that I installed trial version first.

I have been interested in digital scrapbooking and had read that this would be a great tool for managing the array of digital papers, elements etc that go along with the hobby. I purchased recently with a gift card I received from my daughter for Christmas. WOW! This is a great tool for organizing. I can see how it would be incredible to store photos as well.

The support for my application through the forums was great. Lead me to [...]. Lots of great info there on how to use this as a [...]

Really love it. Great gift.

I used the original version of ACDSee when it was a free program that came with the Adobe software years ago,and liked how it worked.I used a newer purchased version later on and I'm not sure why,but I gave Picassa a try and used it for a long time also.I came back to ACDSee because it is able to work with so many file types that a lot of programs can't even open up,ex:WMF,and so far ACDSee can do it.The editing parts are very easy to use and do a superb job.For the price of this software you will not be sorry you bought it. S.Hollowell

I do like the improvements that come with upgrading from version 5(power pack). I find it works much better with Windows 7 than the old version did. I purchased this via Amazon because I want and need a physical copy of the software. If I did not need a physical copy, I would have purchased via the company's website for digital downloads. I knock it one star due to amazon's shipping methods, which sent me a copy of the software where the disk had become dislodged from the standoff in the package and was scratched up pretty bad inside the case. Luckily it still installs and works, but the whole point of getting it via amazon was to have a physical CD.

It is so great to have something that can control the overflow of photographs on my pc. I also use it to categorize my photos and it really helps when you are looking for a particular photo.