ACDSee 9 Photo Manager

by ACD Systems

Product Features

• Auto Categories save you time and effort organizing your photos for you
• Showroom lets you showcase your collection and enjoy it whenever you're working off the desktop
• Print Layout gives you a variety of print layout options with helpful wizards
• Organize on the fly with Group By - Sort and view your photos in more detailed groupings
• Sort photos like a pro with Filter By

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000HKD8P2
• Item model number: ACD900BX-EN
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 30, 2006
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,846 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #50 in Software > Graphics > Image Capture
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

- Marketing Information: ACDSee 9 makes organizing your photos exactly that quick and easy, so you can play with and share the great photos youandquot;ve got. Get Photos fast from any storage device, and ACDSee 9 automatically categorizes your shots based on metadata information (e.g., keywords, size, date taken). You donandquot;t even have to lift a finger. You can also use new password protected Private Folders to store confidential information. Get an array of rapid full-screen quick viewing tools, time-saving Print Layouts that make your home printing easier and less confusing, as well as powerful email options, slide shows, CD/DVD burning, and web album tools that make sharing your photos as easy as can be. Enhance your photos with quick fixes like red-eye removal, color cast removal, exposure adjustments, and the Photo Repair tool. Product Information - Software Sub Type: Image Collection/Management - Software Name: ACDSee Photo Manager v.9.0 - Complete Product - Features and Benefits: - Faster viewing with Quick View mode - Easier photo fixes with One-click red-eye reduction - Bring your photos back to life with the Shadow/Highlight tool - Lock up your special photos with Private folders - Organize your collection with Calendar Events View - Save time and effort with Auto Categories - Show photos right on your desktop with ACDSee Showroom - Make home printing a breeze with Print Layouts - Organize on the fly with Group By - Sort photos like a pro with Filter By -

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ACDSee is still a Bloated Beast, February 5, 2007

By 

R. J. Scanlan III (Woodbridge, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ACDSee 9 Photo Manager (CD-ROM)

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.

ACDSee has become a feature monster. The program does a tremendous amount of background processing and is constantly cataloguing and indexing your images. This is a problem if you work with a large number of new images on a regular basis. 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. The number of system errors and program crashes I've encountered with version 9 is absolutely pathetic for such an established name in this business. 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.

PDF "photo albums", highly configurable contact sheets, exportable file indexes and lists, descript.ion generation, HTML photo albums, simple slide shows, these are all great features I 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. The program has definite qualities.

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 examinine 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 gramma's 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.

(Nitpicking: The font viewer needs work, it would be very useful if it could be configured to display characters other than "FONT". Unfortunately de-selecting the font extensions did not restore the original associations to Windows Font Viewer so I had to do that manually. I'd also really like it if ACDSee didn't keep reminding me of other "great ACDSee products", I've clicked most of the "do not show this again" boxes but still see things from time to time.)

For basic image browsing and pre-photoshop operations such as organization, elimination, and lossless exif rotation I have almost fully converted to irfanview. Because of the instability as your database grows, the constant indexing and cataloguing (think infinitely spinning hourglasses and delayed blank file listings when you'd rather just be viewing images) add all the junk features pros don't need and can't remove--and this has become a potentially annoying application.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for large photo collections!, January 23, 2007

By 

Tabasco (Pittsburgh, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ACDSee 9 Photo Manager (CD-ROM)

My wife and I have tried quite a few photo organizers, most recently including Picasa and Photoshop Elements 5. Picasa is wonderfully simple and stable, but it can't manage photos on DVD/CD, which makes it pretty much useless for those of us with more photos than we care to risk on a single hard disk. Don't even try loading more than 5000 photos into PSE5; the wait you'll suffer to have it start up each session will make you old fast, and I have a modern, fast PC with lots of RAM. Too bad that Adobe still appears to be denying this problem exists, even though a lot of people appear to be suffering from it.

Well, we have 50,000+ images and videos of various sizes, collected on a lot of DVDs. PSE5 was really packed with nice features and appeared pretty stable, but I couldn't take the 20-30 minute wait to load the program each time I wanted to use it. (It loads like lightning with less than 5000 photos.) I Googled up a few other tools, and ACDSee seemed to be the best fit for our collection.

ACDSee 9, aside from the odd name, has been lightning-fast and easily manages all of my photos and videos. It has lots and lots of organizing features and pays special attention to archiving and backing up its database, which is wonderful. The user interface is a bit technical and not overly user-friendly, but the features are worth the extra effort. The included help is marginal, at best. [...]

The editing tools in ACDSee 9 aren't Earth-shattering, but they are good for modest editing. The editing tools in PSE5 are fantastic, as would be expected from Adobe. Since I got snookered into purchasing PSE5, I use ACDSee for the organizing and PSE5 for the editing, disabling the organizer function in PSE5.

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 I have received the occasional "Unexpected error" shutdown notice shortly after attempting to close the program. Either way, my data has never been compromised due to a crash, and even if a problem came up, ACDSee includes strong database opimizing and repair tools to get things back up and running. PSE5 crashed its share of times too, and don't think it was easy to recover, believe me.

Overall, a strong product and the best value for the dollar, in my humble opinion.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome for photos & digital scrapbookers!, December 9, 2006

By 

Connie (Midwest USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ACDSee 9 Photo Manager (CD-ROM)

This is outstanding software for organizing photos & quickly working with them. For example, one can move thru photos cropping, fixing red eye & exposure in a slide show manner.

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. I like how it prevents me from overwriting files with the same name.

And as a digital scrapbooker - this software is preferred over Adobe's organizer and Picassa. Searching is very fast - and categorizing items is very easy. It views over 50 file types including jpeg, png, tiff & fonts. And you can make offline photo discs & search & view the thumbnails even when the disc isn't in your computer! A great feature if you need to free up hard drive space.

Photo Manager also creates a Slideshow CD with music that can be played on any computer with CD/DVD player. What a great gift idea! You can also create an HTML album and publish it on the internet to share with family & friends online.

I highly recommend Photo Manager if you work with a lot of photos or digital scrapbooking supplies. I set it up on my parent's computer so that my mom can download her digital photos & delete the memory card in one click! It's easy to use with straightforward help instructions.