ACDsee 8.0

by ACD Systems

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000B5RREQ
• Item model number: ACD800
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 7, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,199 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

ACDSee 8 Photo Manager: Organize your photos like an expert in no time. ACDSee 8 Photo Manager's razor-sharp search tools help you sift through thousands of pictures effortlessly, find the best ones, and sort them into common sense categories that make them easy to find later. Find your one photo in a million, and easily manage the rest. Count on powerful organizational tools – like customizable folders and categories - that make it easy to keep track of, preserve, and enjoy the memories you hold dear.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Half-great, November 3, 2005

By 

H. Lam (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ACDsee 8.0 (CD-ROM)

ACDSee 8 is a great file-level manager, and easily surpasses most, if not all, of its competitors at the file-level manipulation and organizational functions that are the basis for creating an efficiently structured and effectively manageable digital photograph library of thousands of photographs in size, and larger. ACDSee 8 also sports a basic image editor, a slideshow and screensaver module, and a backup module. Compared to Corel Photo Album 6, ACDSee is missing a creative projects module, which ACDSystems sells in a separate product, as PhotoSlate 4. ACDsee is a great choice for those who need to manipulate a massive number of files regularly. However, ACDSee 8's cumbersome implementation of metadata management features -- the meat of a digital photograph manager -- makes the program difficult to recommend the program to mainstream users.

What makes metadata support so important? A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand or remember a picture's content or context. (E.g., When and where was this picture taken? What is this a picture of? Who are these people? Why did I take this picture?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. In an analog photograph, one could write a description on back of the print itself. With digital photos, this sort of information is kept as metadata. Without metadata, that interesting digital photograph (Holiday Party 2005: Roy and Ciara with Mayor Mike. Unbeknownst to Mayor Mike, Roy and Ciara rose to power by wasting hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars.) is just another anonymous picture. It is metadata that imbues digital photographs with their context and meaning, and that enables digital photograph collections to be quickly organized or synthesized in a wide variety of ways - by timeline, event, location, person, etc.

ACDSee 8 uses three separately maintained subsystems to support image metadata - a proprietary internal database that stores thumbnail images, ratings and category information; and two other subsystems to support the EXIF and IPTC metadata standards. IPTC is the preferred standard for storing picture descriptions; EXIF is the standard for camera information (picture timestamp, exposure settings, etc.). Support for EXIF and IPTC metadata is important, because these two standards enable photograph descriptions (complete memory = photograph + metadata) to be accessible seamlessly:
- outside of ACDSee, relegating product lock-in to the past;
- across online photo sharing sites (such as Fokti and Flickr);
- by family, friends, or other users who don't use ACDSee;
- by posterity, if ACDSee were ever to be discontinued.

While ACDSee 8 has the most complete metadata support of any consumer-grade digital image manager, it is quite cumbersome to use. Searching for a picture or music file? It isn't easy to do in ACDSee. ACDSee has Google-like simplicity only when searching for information in its internal database. To look for data stored in EXIF, IPTC, or ID3 (for music files) metadata, you'll need to specify the field(s) to search, a Boolean condition for the search (is, starts with, contains, etc.), and the data you're looking for. It's as painful as it sounds.

ACDSee's IPTC metadata subsystem is new to Version 8, and is not as developed as the ACDSee internal database and EXIF subsystems. While the program supports batch operations (working on multiple files simultaneously, e.g., assigning the description Grandpa's Birthday to a collection of photographs) for ACDSee's internal database and EXIF subsystems, batch operations are not supported for IPTC metadata. IPTC metadata entries must be painstakingly made on a per picture basis in ACDSee. Experienced users may look to PixVue, a free Windows Explorer extension, for a full IPTC/XMP metadata editor that supports batch operations, so at worst ACDSee users will find it burdensome to transfer information from ACDSee's internal database or EXIF metadata subsystem to IPTC. ACDSee does not support Unicode, so foreign language support (for recording foreign toponyms and friends in your photographs without the need for Romanize them) is limited.

ACDSee 8 continues to be a great file-level digital image library manager, best for those with thousands of pictures and those who don't care about metadata. With improvements to its search and IPTC metadata features, ACDSee could be a standout product for everyone. Interestingly, since ACDSee 8 supports searching through ID3 metadata (albeit painfully), future versions of ACDSee may potentially be good music managers, too.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So many disappointments, January 27, 2006

By 

OldEngineer (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ACDsee 8.0 (CD-ROM)

Without any warning words that I can find on the box this company limits home users with activation. With desk, laptop, wife and child computers I am looking at $200 to upgrade for the sole purpose of being able to finally add captions in a portable data format that I can take to other photo management software when this company falters. (For a discussion of portable data formats see `Half Great', a Nov. 3, 2005 review.)

I downloaded version 8 in October 2005 to finally get the IPTC format that is in other photo management software but not in what has been my favorite software up to now.

Invited to spend $50 to make my free demo copy permanent I had found the software so buggy that I realized I better wait for the first update. Now it is February 2006. There is still no update offered for version 8. It appears that the company is working on other new products. Perhaps that has taken priority over fixing the problems of early purchasers.

Impatient to get on with making portable captions I got version 8 in a box. Mistake. Still no update on the site but a stealth activation feature. For a family with several computers for historic and convenience reasons, but whose total hours of use is slight, this is bad. It is also bad if your idea of how to remove a virus or worm is to save your data and roll in a system image from last month. Software that requires activation creates a phone hassle.

I have uninstalled ACDSee 8, written it off as a waste of money, and have decided to see how much I can accomplish with Google's free Picasa software. Google built it from the start with IPTC so the captions and searching are portable. The captions I entered in my photos with the ACDSee 8 trial download last October work perfectly in Picasa.

If you are new to this photo management business then I recommend you start right out with another product like Picasa. I haven't used the comparable Adobe product but have friends who recommend it. If you are an old ACDSee user (it was long ago shareware) and want to upgrade, consider buying version 7. It is still available here and the updates available on the company site suggest the code should be stable. A few months ago Fry's was offering ACDSee 7 with a full purchase price rebate. I believe those are the "used" (described as new but without UPC code) ones on sale for less through Amazon as well.

I see someone here says that the Adobe software is slow when you have lots of pictures. Perhaps. I have been working the last two days with Picasa and my 12 thousand photos. Everything I do seems to be as quick as on my ACDSee 6.03.

Picasa is different; you do things differently; and subfolder management does not seem to be as good. ACDSee manages folders of photos the way your wished My Computer did.

I intend to add captions and do all I can with Picasa. When that isn't sufficient I will fall back to using my old ACDSee. This really illustrates the point made in "Half Great". I can only move to the best photo management software if the data about my pictures is in portable format. That is why I have waited so long for IPTC; you should use it too.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Buggy buggy buggy, May 22, 2006

By 

D. Mitchell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ACDsee 8.0 (CD-ROM)

ACDSee gets a lot of user-interface ideas right, but they have a long and very serious problem with quality control. I've used every version of this software since 4.0, and the bugs just drive me crazy. It crashes, it writes messed up jpg files, its resizin filters have off-by-pixel mistakes that shift images. And it just never gets better in this regard. Hire a new programmer, guys!