ACDSee 8 Photo Manager Review

With the move to digital-based photography, disorganization of photos can quickly become the norm. ACDSee closes that gap with its product chock-full of tools to effectively tag, categorize, mark and manage all of your digital photos. Installation was smooth using a Windows .msi approach. Enabling the trial version was slightly cumbersome, but once done the product comes up ready to hit the road. Effective use of screen space gives handy access tp all tools with a minimum of mouse clicks: Folders (disk and offline media) on the left, picture viewer/selector in the center and organizing tools on the right. The developers have accommodated both the simplest of needs and those required by advanced users. This includes small nice touches like a zoom slidebar as well as managing/cataloging photos moved to offsite media (e.g. burned CD, external drive, etc.) Key to effective photo organization is robust categorization facilities as well as access to the core pictures attributes (date/time stamp, ISO, etc.) In this area, ACDSee moves ahead of its competitors. They have realized that user-defined categories including sub-categories is a necessity and have included that in the product as well as FULL access to all picture data; they have followed that up with easy searching based on any combination of attributes. Their website does not support email problem submissions; however, I found their Knowledge Base to be very extensive and the sample documents I viewed were very thorough (e.g. differences for Vista were included, etc.)