Cheap ACDSee 9 Photo Manager (Software) (Windows XP) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of ACDSee 9 Photo Manager

ACDSee is still a Bloated Beast
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. <
>

Excellent for large photo collections!
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.