ACDSee 5.0

Rating:
Summary: Better than the "mainstream" products
Review: ACD Systems has produced a nice stable very flexible product with ACDSee 5.0. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Album, ACDSee didn't crash my PC!

I actually bought ACDSee 5.0 Powerpack ... and it includes FotoCanvas (for editing and creating images) and FotoAngelo (a slide show program). Unlike most of the other products, ACD Systems offers plug-ins that integrate very well with this core software including FotoSlate which is great for printing photo albums with or without captions on a variety of different paper sizes.

Initially, it can be overwhelming because there are so many things it can do, but once you get used to it, you'll find it is much more capable than Photoshop Album, and very likely Picture It! Also, it opens a tremendous variety of file formats including the standards as well as the obscure and with mPower tools, it can open even more formats! Audio, Image, Video, it handles them all and with a free plug-in, it can even open Adobe Acrobat files.

If you want a piece of software that can organize your photos, this is a great start. The plug-ins do a great deal more to expand its capability. It is initially slightly more ... than PhotoShop Album, but as I found with the useless copy of PhotoShop Album I now own, you get what you pay for.

Rating:
Summary: Better than the "mainstream" products
Review: ACD Systems has produced a nice stable very flexible product with ACDSee 5.0. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Album, ACDSee didn't crash my PC!

I actually bought ACDSee 5.0 Powerpack ... and it includes FotoCanvas (for editing and creating images) and FotoAngelo (a slide show program). Unlike most of the other products, ACD Systems offers plug-ins that integrate very well with this core software including FotoSlate which is great for printing photo albums with or without captions on a variety of different paper sizes.

Initially, it can be overwhelming because there are so many things it can do, but once you get used to it, you'll find it is much more capable than Photoshop Album, and very likely Picture It! Also, it opens a tremendous variety of file formats including the standards as well as the obscure and with mPower tools, it can open even more formats! Audio, Image, Video, it handles them all and with a free plug-in, it can even open Adobe Acrobat files.

If you want a piece of software that can organize your photos, this is a great start. The plug-ins do a great deal more to expand its capability. It is initially slightly more ... than PhotoShop Album, but as I found with the useless copy of PhotoShop Album I now own, you get what you pay for.

Rating:
Summary: ACDSee versus Memories Instant Computer Scrapbook
Review: ACDSee's advantage continues to no-nonsense and no-frills organizing photos.[...]
I think many people are already looking to go beyond generic photo organizing capabilities and looking to the new generation of software like Memories that can handle all sorts of multimedia and is very easy to use.

Rating:
Summary: Beware of 5.0
Review: I have been using ACDSee for years. I have always used the trial versions. I finally took the plunge and bought the full version. It's great! It allows you to catagorize your photos in more than one place. No more multiple copies on my drive. It prints great and the basic editing features it came with are very adequate for my level of skills.

There are many more feature that I have not used or no time to describe.

There is no faster way to view or organize your photos.

Rating:
Summary: Great Software
Review: I have been using ACDSee for years. I have always used the trial versions. I finally took the plunge and bought the full version. It's great! It allows you to catagorize your photos in more than one place. No more multiple copies on my drive. It prints great and the basic editing features it came with are very adequate for my level of skills.

There are many more feature that I have not used or no time to describe.

There is no faster way to view or organize your photos.

Rating:
Summary: extremely slow on new powermac
Review: It take an average of 2 minutes to open any JPEG file. I have used it in the past on PC's and it was great but this is rediculious. If it is a large JPEG you may wait over 5 minutes. I have a brand new G4 with the ram and harddrive maxed out so I know the problem is not on my end. Would not reccommend on an Apple anyway. I have heard of similar cases with the new version on pc's also. I have one file with a little over 3000 pictures i it and it took over 30 min. just to open the file, not to mention even slower on the actual pictures. Very dissapointed in what was a previous great product.

Rating:
Summary: Beware of 5.0
Review: This would be a great product if it followed the example set by the previous versions. However, version 5.0 is slow and more importantly will not open at all if you have certain hyperlinks in the directory you have graphics in (like the desktop). ACDSee does not seem to have any plans to correct the issue when I called them. Check the web for other reviews on this product, and stay with version 3 until the current release is fixed. By the way, I have 5.0, but I am not happy with it

Rating:
Summary: Better Than The Rest
Review: Though not as nicely designed or flashy as Photoshop Album, ACDSee has two decisive advantages over the Adobe product: (1) it handles networked files correctly (no local copies are created, and users have full control over caching and cached thumbnail size) and (2) it exports the information in its database to XML so that it can be used in other applications. Oddly though, the category information is not exported. ACDSee also does a much better job of dealing with file management overall. For example, if you use ACDSee's file browser to move files, it will update its database accordingly so you don't get broken links (a big and nearly fatal problem with Photoshop Album).

In short, ACDSee is clearly superior to Photoshop Album (except on looks), but still not quite there.

UPDATE (4/24/03): The latest free update (5.01) adds categoization data to the list of information exported! With this addition, ACDSee becomes far and away the best tool for organizing digital photo libraries. The only thing it still lacks is some of the flash of the Adobe product, but in terms of features and performance, this is the clear winner.