Entered CNET Catalog: 12/05/2002
SKU: ACDSEE500WINUSDENC
Manufacturer: ACD Systems
Manufacturer description
ACDSee 5.0 makes it easy to get, view, organize, print, enhance and share your digital photos super fast. Whether you're a digital photography beginner or a graphics professional, the picture viewer of choice for millions of people will make your digital camera software experience more rewarding.CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 12/05/2002
 See what we mean? ACDSee piles on the tabs and icons in 5.0, though you can simplify matters by customizing the tabs that appear or by reverting to 3.0's interface. |
When you first open the program, you'll see a Windows Explorer-like view on your left and thumbnails of your images on the right. Just as in version 4.0, you can view and organize your images from the left-hand pane. Use the Calendar tab--new to version 5.0--to search for images by date. Can't remember when you imported those great August vacation shots? ACDSee 5.0 highlights just the days that have images associated with them. The right side of the screen displays your image files as thumbnails or large images and lets you view properties such as EXIF metadata or database keywords. To check or edit your EXIF info, use the handy Metadata Property View. Compared to the competition, ACDSee excels at preserving this information for quick reference.
And from within the Customize dialog box, you can tweak the layout of the program's windows or switch among several different schemes. If you've created a few different layouts that you swap in and out depending on what you're working on, you can save them with a unique name and recall them at will. Unfortunately, saving your layouts is tedious: you must first exit the customize dialog box so that the new layout is current, then go back to the customize screen to name and save it. Like its predecessor, ACDSee 5.0 comes bundled with FotoCanvas Lite, a simple editor you can use to make basic tweaks to your photos. ACD Systems also offers a $79.95 PowerPack bundle, which includes ACDSee 5.0; FotoCanvas 2.0, a comprehensive image-editing program that supports Photoshop plug-ins; and FotoAngelo, a slide-show utility that lets you save your productions as self-contained executables or Windows screensaver files. FotoCanvas can handle most simple and a few complex tasks, but if you need to do any heavy-duty editing, you'll have to invest in PhotoImpact or Photoshop Elements.
 Note the calendar in the left pane. This program automatically highlights days that have corresponding photos. |
As soon as you load the program, ACDSee automatically catalogs the photos in your My Pictures folder and groups them under the Albums tab. But cataloging them by searching across directories and adding category descriptors and keywords is the more practical use for the product. There are a few speed bumps in the road to organization: you can't manually enter a path into the Catalog dialog or create a category on the fly. However, you can do some pretty cool things with the Category View. You can assign your images to one or more categories for refined searching and sorting later on down the road. And rather than organizing your images in file folders, which often leads to making duplicate copies of a single image, ACDSee just creates shortcuts to the files. This way, you can store your pictures in a single folder, then assign existing categories such as Friends, Family, and Hobbies. Another perk: the Delete key has no power in the Category View. You get rid of the shortcuts, not the actual files. ACD claims that it improved performance in ACDSee 5.0, but we found performance to be a mixed bag. On occasion, we experienced a considerable delay when displaying the last few thumbnails out of a directory with lots of image files. We also crashed a couple of times in random use on two systems. ACDSee's slide-show mode does work well, though. When viewing your pictures as a slide show, they come up in a flash, since ACDSee preloads the next image in the sequence. Manual viewing fetches each image as viewed, and if you're into statistics, a counter on the bottom of the screen shows you the load time.
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| You can do some light editing. Compare this shot before (left) and after (right) we lightened it. | |
User opinions
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User Rating: 
1/10
Picture It - Digital Image is Better!
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I work daily with digital photography for my business. I need tools to help me modify and repair photos quickly and easily. I thought I'd try ACD's suite of tools. I shelled out lots of money and was greatly dissappointed. My recommendation is to try Microsoft Picture It! Digital Image Pro. In the end, it is actually a little cheaper. It everything ACD does and much more. The controls are outstanding. Version 7.0 really shines. Don't waste your time on ACD.
User Rating: 
7/10
Cannot Do Without it anymore
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Tryed some few other programs, but ACDsee works well and can handle plenty of other features that other programs cannot. The interface is a bit intimidating at first but quite easy to get around after a while. About stability I never had a problem and handle more than ten thousands of pictures at times in a same directory. My ram is 512meg on win2000 with a pentium 4 1.6 gig
User Rating: 
9/10
The best imaging program I could find.
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I jave Photoshop, Ulead, Jasc and others, but ACDSee is, for me, the easiest and most ********* program I own. I read the CNET review that mentions the media manager in XP. XP is the very reason I need another program. I have XP Pro over a year and have found no media manager. In addition, Kodak Imaging was removed, which took away the ability to see a larger than thumnail size preview of each image before opening it. ACDSee does this and more. With one plug in, I set up all my photo printing. I don't know how I would be able to print standars size pronts without it.
User Rating: 
3/10
unstable and unreliable
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extremely unstable; very frequent lockups; common windows commands sometimes don't work; but it has a big advantage over xp viewer by allowing more edits and providing an enlargement of selected thumb in separate window; considering instability, overpriced
User Rating: 
8/10
Stunning Program - A Must Have for any Digital Camera Pro-consumer
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This program does everything a digital swiss army knife would do and then some. This is THE best organizer and viewer (and more) available. Red eye reduction and a slew of editing features make me wonder if the CNET reviewer really looked at the editor. It even converts RAW files. I've used this product since version 2. Version 5 is a stunning example of what a company can do when they listen to user feedback. I'm confused why CNET says it is unstable. It hasn't crashed more than once for me on 2000 or XP and I use it daily since it came out. The only down side to this product is that it is so full featured, the interface can seem cluttered and difficult to navigate or find the feature you're looking for.
User Rating: 3/10
Complex
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Typical "throw in everything including the kitchen sink" approach. Makes simple things hard.
User Rating: 
10/10
Best image browser, period.
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Tried them all and ACDSee is the best. XP and others just don't have the many features and conveniences of AC and it generates thumbs in half the time of others. Editing is mute criticism as its only a convience feature when you don't want to open your full featured program such as PhotoShop, etc., any good digital photographer isn't going to use a browser editor for serious work, but AC will still do a lot, and quickly with quality, with its limited editor included free. I've had very few proplems and never had a "crash." well worth the money, I use it all the time for all file browsing.
