Review: ACDSee 8 Photo Manager

The first thing that strikes you about ACDSee 8 Photo Manager is the sheer number of panes on the screen: in Browser mode there are no fewer than 12 of them.

If you like your interfaces simple and uncluttered, this isn’t for you. However, it’s better to have too much information than too little and you can close what you don’t need and rearrange things to your own preferences.

A Folders pane displays everything on your computer Windows Explorer-style and you can switch views to display favourite folders or a calendar view.

Thumbnails are displayed in the middle and on the right an organiser pane is used to categorise photos and add ratings.

In contrast to some other applications (most notably Microsoft Digital Image Library) ACDSee was extremely quick to load and display a large folder of Jpegs.

Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format) data is displayed on a tab of the properties pane which can also be used to display file information, the caption, rating, category and keyword information from ACDSee’s database and the embedded IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) metadata.

Existing keywords in our imported files were retained and to add to or edit any of this data, you simply type in the properties pane. Editable fields are helpfully picked out in blue.

In addition to the organisational features, an editing mode provides a wide range of editing tools including basic things such as crop and sharpen, as well as heal and clone brushes and an extensive collection of filters.

ACDSee won’t suit everyone. The complex layout, vast amount of information on display and wide range of options for organising, tagging and searching photos will be intimidating for novice digital photographers.

But if the prospect of having access to every last snippet of Exif data in your photos – and the power to manipulate it – appeals to you it won’t disappoint.

This article is part of a group test of photo album software
See also
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Corel Photo Album 6
Google Picasa 2
Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006
Serif Album Plus 4
IPTC and keywords

The table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above