Customer Reviews

ACDsee 6.0 Deluxe

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ACDSee 6.0.0.0065 from ACDSystems is nearly a must-have product for intermediate and advanced users, and for those contemplating creating and maintaining collections of hundreds of photographs and more. ACDSee surpasses most, if not all, of its competitors at the file-level manipulation and organizational functions that are the basis of creating an efficiently structured and effectively manageable digital media library. While ACDSee makes only a fair showing in metadata management, the program is still better than many of its competitors. Though far more stable, ACDSee 6 is not a a must-have upgrade for users of ACDSee 5. ACDSee 6's various improvements are essentially minor, and do not better the program's standing against the competition.

ACDSee's functions for selecting, copying, moving, renaming, and manipulating (timestamping, rotating, etc.) multiple files make file-level management quick and pleasant work. The program's small touches may be overlooked, but are easily appreciated when compared to other programs. For example, ACDSee uniquely uses file-type icons above each image thumbnail to let users visually, quickly distinguish between similarly-named master and derivative files for appropriate action, e.g., between a high-resolution File001.tiff for archiving and a low-resolution File001.jpg for Internet photo-sharing.

ACDSee features a nice rotation tool that can rotate, flip, and invert images in any number of directions. This is particularly useful to those who scan film negatives because some cameras take pictures upside-down. Many other programs, including Adobe PhotoShop Album 2, Microsoft Digital Image Library 9, and Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 4 can only rotate pictures left or right. Of note, ACDSee supports "lossless" .JPEG rotation, an ability that Digital Image Library 9 omits, and that Adobe's PhotoShop Album 2 only partially supports. JPEG files are inherently "lossy;" that is, image quality is degraded each time a file is saved. With lossless .JPEG operations, ACDSee maintains image quality even after a picture rotation.

Support for metadata in an image manager is important. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand a picture's content or context. (E.g., What is this a picture of? Who are these people?) Even the photographer himself may not remember these things one or five years later. Metadata is a useful mnemonic device that helps by providing a way to store a photograph's caption text, category, timestamp, camera settings, and other useful attributes with a digital image.

The great weakness of ACDSee 6 is its disjointed metadata management capabilities. ACDSee uses two separately-maintained mechanisms for metadata management; a proprietary internal database that centrally stores image thumbnails, notes, keywords, category and ranking information; and the EXIF standard (used by most digital cameras) that embeds metadata information inside pictures themselves. The former works well for speed, but the latter is preferable for interoperability and reliability. As EXIF metadata is implanted inside the picture itself, consumers may share their pictures and picture information with other people (who may employ programs other than ACDSee). Further, if a user changes a picture's filename outside of ACDSee, the picture retains its EXIF metadata information but may lose its ACDSee database entry. ACDSee 6 retains a bug from Version 5: adding EXIF metadata to an 8-bit grayscale TIFF image will mangle the image with some sort of Emboss effect.

The independence of ACDSee's internal database and EXIF support subsystems guarantees duplicative work effort for consumers who want to preserve their metadata in both subsystems. ACDSee does not make this easy. The program does not allow metadata to be transferred between the subsystems, so information must be entered twice. While the program supports batch operations (such as assigning the same Image Description to multiple photographs, e.g. Grandpa's Birthday) for ACDSee's internal database, batch operations are not supported for EXIF metadata. EXIF metadata entries must be painstakingly made on a per picture basis in ACDSee. Fortunately, ACDSee users can turn to freeware programs like Exifer (http://www.exifer.friedemann.info), an EXIF and IPTC metadata editor, to make up for shortcomings in ACDSee's EXIF metadata capabilities.

It is too bad that ACDSee does not support IPTC metadata. Photo-sharing sites such as Fotki.com use IPTC Object Name (e.g., Office Christmas Party 2003) and Caption (e.g, Brian, his wife Maya, his workplace mistress Ciara) entries automatically. At these services, users of ACDSee end up potentially triplicating data entry - in ACDSee's internal database, in EXIF metadata, and then on the Internet.

Still, most of ACDSee's competitors do worse at supporting metadata standards. Microsoft Digital Image Library 9.0.603 imports the EXIF Image Description field as the program's Caption field, but all subsequent changes to captions are kept inside Digital Image Library's internal database only, and not exported back to the picture itself. Similarly, Adobe's PhotoShop Album 2 transparently supports the use of the EXIF Image Description field as the program's Caption field, but all notes are kept inside PhotoShop Album's internal catalog only. Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album 4.03 can recognize EXIF metadata, the program does not make use of it. Users must instead rely on the Paint Shop Photo Album's internal database, which like its competitors, may be subject to breakage if a filename is changed outside the program. Photodex's CompuPic Pro 6.22 can only read (but not edit) EXIF metadata, and does not have internal notes or keywords facilities.

ACDSee 6 and its close competitor, Adobe's PhotoShop Album 2, are meant for two different purposes. ACDSee's strength is file-level management, while PhotoShop Album is more focused creative projects. Consumers that primarily want to *use* their photographs to create calendars, photo books, video CDs, greeting cards, e-cards, etc., should consider PhotoShop Album. ACDSee does not have the tools for these sorts of projects. There is only one product that does more than ACDSee at a similar price point - Photools.com's IMatch 3.4. With the exception of a Calendar view, IMatch has nearly every other piece of the kitchen sink including EXIF and IPTC metadata editors, categories, batch processing, scripting, etc. IMatch is also correspondingly far more difficult to use.

ACDSee 6 is a very good product; a great file manager, and one of the better choices for metadata management in the current crop of consumer-grade digital media library managers.

Though not as nicely designed or flashy as Photoshop Album, ACDSee has two decisive advantages over the Adobe product: (1) it handles networked files correctly (no local copies are created, and users have full control over caching and cached thumbnail size) and (2) it exports the information in its database to XML so that it can be used in other applications. ACDSee also does a much better job of dealing with file management overall. For example, if you use ACDSee's file browser to move files, it will update its database accordingly so you don't get broken links as easily (a big and nearly fatal problem with Photoshop Album).

ACDSee is clearly superior to Photoshop Album. The only thing it still lacks is some of the flash of the Adobe product, but in terms of features and performance, this is the clear winner.

If the choice were between ACDSee and Adobe's product (now in version 2.0), the decision would be easy, but the recent release of Microsoft Digital Image Library 9.0 has changed everything: for photographers with more than a few hundred images (especially those who are just looking for an image library tool and don't need the image editing and project bells and whistles of ACDSee or Photoshop Album) Microsoft's Digital Image Library 9.0 may be the best bet: it uses a more robust and logical data storage model (library information is stored in the image files, so it can't be lost and because the program "monitors" folders, there's no such thing as a broken link) and it even has (surprisingly!) a more functional and cleaner user interface for browsing and navigating large image libraries (the thumbnail zoom and "find similar" features are impressive).

In short, if you are looking fro a single-package image organization, touch-up, and project creation tool for a few hundred images then ACDSee is the best bet (far superior to Photoshop Album) but if you have a significant number of images and are simply looking for the best image library tool, you should seriously consider the newest contender, Microsoft's Digital Image Library 9.0.

I have been using ACDSee for years, and it has long ago become my default image browser AND file manager. I have faithfully upgraded through the years, and unfortunately have noticed a trend: what used to be a cheap, FAST and reliable program has become "bloatware", an application so over-laden with useless features that it defeats its very purpose: fast, reliable image browsing. I have actually uninstalled 6.0 (the new 6.0.3 patch does little) and gone back to 4.0.2. Even ACDsee Classic, which is free, will blow this piece of junk out of the water. It's too bad that they've lost sight of why this was a great program! It takes eons to catalog and view files, and the reliability is ludicrously bad. Whereas browsing through 1000's of files used to be a snap, it is a chore with 6.0.

Perhaps the last time ACDSee was really useful was a late entry in Rev 3. Now there's just too much clutter and convolution to executing the fundamental tasks this used to perform so simply.

The attempt to win new customers with endless new features that consistently destroy the usabilty of the previous rev is tragic. The packaging for 6.0 should just have call-outs all over it that say "Another Feature of No Use to You the Consumer!!!" and, "Feature Included to Appease the Marketing Dept!!" I just wish once the MBA wielding drones who clutter Americas corporations would keep their finger out of the pie. In their eyes the company would go under if it didn't remain competetive, but since I haven't upgraded since 3.0 what's the difference?

There are ways to migrate a great product forward. This isn't it.