ACDSee 6 Deluxe

ACDSee started off its life as an easy-to-use and uncomplicated image viewer. Six versions on, however, it's developed almost beyond recognition.

As a consequence of more and more features being crammed into the package, the once simple interface has taken quite a beating. Indeed, at first sight it can be more than a little intimidating. With a large collection of windows and numerous ways in which to hunt down your photos, newcomers will probably find it difficult to get to grips with. Thankfully it is possible to hide most of these windows, and revert to a directory listing and a preview screen.

It comes as no surprise that the current craze for digital cameras is catered for in ACDSee 6, and most of the new features are aimed squarely at digicam owners. The Acquire Wizard won't be much use to those who already know how to download images from their digital camera, but it serves as a useful tool for novices. Windows XP already comes with a pretty decent acquire wizard, so you may prefer to use that instead.

The Properties window enables you to examine all sorts of information about individual images, including file and image attributes. What's more, if you're unsure why your photos don't look quite the way you want them to, the Exif data for each image can also be viewed from the properties window. Exif data holds advanced information about the camera's settings when the photo was taken, for example focal length, shutter speed and whether or not the flash fired.

The great thing about digital cameras is that you can snap away without having to worry about film processing costs. However, being a trigger-happy photographer also means you're going to be downloading more than a few photos to your PC.

If you're the kind of person who has your photos littered all over your hard disk in no particular order, ACDSee is able to give you a helping hand when it comes to organising them. Categories can be created with ease, and you are then able to assign individual photos to them. Once you've built up a database of images, this categorisation makes it easier to locate specific photos.

With the new photo rating system, ACDSee lets you quickly rate your photos by giving them a score from one to five. Once you've weeded out the good from the ugly, you can use the ratings you've assigned to sort your photos in order of quality. It's not the most sophisticated tool, but it works well if you want to earmark your favourite photos for future reference.

With so many photos stored on your hard disk, what better way to display them than create your very own screensaver? The screensaver creation tool itself is fairly uncomplicated and it doesn't take long to design one from scratch - just don't expect too much control over how it works.

Alternatively, you can display your photos in the form of a slideshow or export them to a CD or DVD. ACDSee also includes some more advanced features, such as the ability to perform batch renaming. This is especially useful if you're fed up with random image names being assigned to photos from your digital camera.

The main issue we have with ACDSee 6 is that the interface seems far too jumbled. As we've already said, it is possible to close down windows to reduce what's on the screen, but then you start to lose out on functionality.

Back in the early days of ACDSee, it won numerous awards for being a simplistic image viewer. However, recent versions have turned it into something much more complex and, although the new functions are useful, it's lost some of its appeal.

Despite our grumbles, we still feel it's a great application with which to view and organise your images. It houses plenty of features that help you sort out your photos, and makes browsing for images in numerous locations a breeze.

Contact: Guildsoft 0800 289 041
www.guildsoft.co.uk

System requirements:

• Windows 98 or above
• Pentium III 500MHz
• 64MB of Ram
• 60MB of hard disk space