ACDSee 8 Photo Manager Review

ACDSee has been my choice for photo management since version 3.1. I'm a photo addict that takes lots of pictures; and ACDSee is the best one yet I found to organize the hundreds of pictures I have. I recently tried Picasa, but it has too much pizzazz to my taste that I didn't like, which is a bit dizzying.

The first version I used, ACDSee version 3.1 is fast: fast browsing, thumbnail view, and image view. It was version 3.1 that made me a fan of ACDSee. But recent ACDSee version seems to have lost that speed. I wouldn't suggest using versions after 3.1 for slow computers.

I switched to version 5 because of its better image editing features and batch renaming tool. Image cropping, image resizing, canvass resizing, red-eye correction, and image retouching are easy to do with ACDSee; and these features have been improved in version 8, such as with cropping. In version 5, it was hard to make accurately sized cropped image with only the mouse. After cropping, I would still need to change the canvass size and resize the image. But with version 8 there's already input boxes where I can specify the height and width of the crop area. However, I miss the ability to change the canvass size with version 8.

ACDSee version 8 has much better support for batch processing. There is a command called Batch Process where images can be processed for many attributes; e.g. crop, resize, color cast, exposure, noise removal, etc.

Another feature I like is the ACDSee Device Detector. It recognizes digital cameras and removable medias for easy file transfer.