ACDSee 5.0

by ACD Systems

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006Y0E7
• Item model number: ACDSEE500WINUSD
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 7, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,600 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better Than The Rest, March 4, 2003

By 

R. A. Levien "Aldaron" (Lexington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ACDSee 5.0 (CD-ROM)

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. Oddly though, the category information is not exported. 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 (a big and nearly fatal problem with Photoshop Album).

In short, ACDSee is clearly superior to Photoshop Album (except on looks), but still not quite there.

UPDATE (4/24/03): The latest free update (5.01) adds categoization data to the list of information exported! With this addition, ACDSee becomes far and away the best tool for organizing digital photo libraries. 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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than the "mainstream" products, June 10, 2003

By 

ejwitt (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ACDSee 5.0 (CD-ROM)

ACD Systems has produced a nice stable very flexible product with ACDSee 5.0. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Album, ACDSee didn't crash my PC!

I actually bought ACDSee 5.0 Powerpack ... and it includes FotoCanvas (for editing and creating images) and FotoAngelo (a slide show program). Unlike most of the other products, ACD Systems offers plug-ins that integrate very well with this core software including FotoSlate which is great for printing photo albums with or without captions on a variety of different paper sizes.

Initially, it can be overwhelming because there are so many things it can do, but once you get used to it, you'll find it is much more capable than Photoshop Album, and very likely Picture It! Also, it opens a tremendous variety of file formats including the standards as well as the obscure and with mPower tools, it can open even more formats! Audio, Image, Video, it handles them all and with a free plug-in, it can even open Adobe Acrobat files.

If you want a piece of software that can organize your photos, this is a great start. The plug-ins do a great deal more to expand its capability. It is initially slightly more ... than PhotoShop Album, but as I found with the useless copy of PhotoShop Album I now own, you get what you pay for.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beware of 5.0, January 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: ACDSee 5.0 (CD-ROM)

This would be a great product if it followed the example set by the previous versions. However, version 5.0 is slow and more importantly will not open at all if you have certain hyperlinks in the directory you have graphics in (like the desktop). ACDSee does not seem to have any plans to correct the issue when I called them. Check the web for other reviews on this product, and stay with version 3 until the current release is fixed. By the way, I have 5.0, but I am not happy with it