Acdsee 6.0 Powerpack Deluxe

Rating:
Summary: Complete photo/image management system
Review: I needed software to manage my digital picture collection (which grows pretty quickly). I did not like the Adobe product. ACDSee PowerPack provides a good image organizer. You can define your own categories and subcategories such as People with subcategories of Family, Friends, etc. and easily assign pictures to multiple categories. You can then search for pictures by combining categories or folders; you can also find pictures by date. ACDSee easily imported my existing picture collection,
and image acquisition from memory cards is easy, with flexible renaming, automatic rotation, etc.

Basic image viewing is very convenient, even more so than the excellent freeware image viewer, IrfanView. It is very easy to zoom and pan high resolution images with the keyboard (i.e. + to zoom in, - to zoom out, arrow keys to pan).

You can also create image CD's and web pages. I don't use this much, but it was competent in how it created. Missing is a feature to fit images to the screen size in web pages (since many of my pictures are high resolution and don't fit, but I don't want to resize them.)

The FotoCanvas editor is fairly complete. Not as full featured as Adobe PhotoShop Elements, but decent. Intuitive crop feature, good color and exposure correction, despeckle, etc. All make for a complete enough photo retouching product. However, the red-eye elimination feature does not work very well; I use PhotoShop for that.

FotoSlate provides good picture printing capabilities. The
UI is not very intuitive but once you figure it out, it is
easy to print custom sized prints. One nice feature is the ability to crop from within FotoSlate, so you do not have to edit and save a cropped version of the picture before printing. It has common print sizes (5x7, 8x10) for cropping. This is nice for me because my camera takes images with an aspect ratio which does not match print sizes.

ACDSee has some flaws. To perform operations on images (printing, create a CD, create a web page, etc.), you put them in an "image basket". However, once you put an image in the basket, you can't use the basket to return to the image (i.e. to edit/crop it, etc.) This makes it hard to use if you select pictures from multiple folders. To get around this, I create temporary categories instead and simply add pictures to the temporary categories. ACDSee should fix the product so the "Image Basket" is simply a special category instead of a separate UI feature - it would be more consistent. (In fact, for burning pictures to a CD, they do use a special category.)

There are some inconsistencies -- there are multiple ways to do many operations. For example, the ACDSee image viewer has a primitive image editor, while FotoCanvas provides more full featured editing, but operations common to both are not always the same. The crop to common photo sizes feature of FotoSlate is not available in FotoCanvas.

I've had some stability problems. Frequently, while running the viewer, when I press Ctrl-E to edit a picture, FotoCanvas crashes before opening. A second attempt to run it usually works. (I've got a clean Windows XP system, no viruses or adware/malware.

Technical support could be better -- there is no direct email support, so you must fill out forms, and its hard to find the form from which you can submit problem/defect reports. Then, sometimes that process fails with a server error! There is an automatic update process if you register, but updates seem very infrequent, even though some bugs should be trivial to fix/patch.

Overall, I like ACDSee PowerPack. It meets most of my needs and does so fairly well.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than Adobe Photo Album; But No Longer The Best
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. 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 as easily (a big and nearly fatal problem with Photoshop Album).

ACDSee is clearly superior to Photoshop Album. 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.

If the choice were between ACDSee and Adobe's product (now in version 2.0), the decision would be easy, but the recent release of Microsoft Digital Image Library 9.0 has changed everything: for photographers with more than a few hundred images (especially those who are just looking for an image library tool and don't need the image editing and project bells and whistles of ACDSee or Photoshop Album) Microsoft's Digital Image Library 9.0 may be the best bet: it uses a more robust and logical data storage model (library information is stored in the image files, so it can't be lost and because the program "monitors" folders, there's no such thing as a broken link) and it even has (surprisingly!) a more functional and cleaner user interface for browsing and navigating large image libraries (the thumbnail zoom and "find similar" features are impressive).

In short, if you are looking fro a single-package image organization, touch-up, and project creation tool for a few hundred images then ACDSee is the best bet (far superior to Photoshop Album) but if you have a significant number of images and are simply looking for the best image library tool, you should seriously consider the newest contender, Microsoft's Digital Image Library 9.0.