Pros & Cons
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- Fast image display.
- Good red-eye and blemish tools.
- Configurable user interface.
- Included online galleries.
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- Not as many image-enhancement options as similarly priced competitors.
- No support for 16-bit per channel image editing.
Now at version 19, the ACDSee photo editing application has been around about as long as photos have been posted on the Web. The app has always been fast, lightweight software compatible with a wide variety of image formats and boasting good photo-organizing and viewing tools. The latest version adds new views and editing capabilities, many shared by the company's professional digital photo workflow tool, ACDSee Pro. But ACDSee is no Photoshop, nor even a Photoshop Elements in terms of powerful image editing. It nevertheless offers an impressive assortment of effects and tools for viewing and tuning digital images.
Pricing and Starting Up
ACDSee lists for $59.99, but it's frequently discounted. At the time of this writing, it's available for a mere $32.95. That compares favorably with A $99.99 one-time fee for Photoshop Elements and a $99-per-year subscription price for Photoshop CC. You can also download a free trial of ACDSee 19 with unlimited features that works for 30 days. The installer is a very small 1.3MB download, and I had the program set up in a jiffy on my test computer, an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC. This PC sports a 4K touchscreen display, so I was able to test how the app handled those hardware capabilities.ACDSee is available for Windows 7 through Windows 10; for Apple fans, ACD does make ACDSee Pro for Mac, which sells for just $49.99 and includes a feature set that falls between those of ACDSee and ACDSee Pro 9 for Windows. An ACD365 subscription gets you all of the company's photo software and online storage and galleries for $99 per year (discounted to $48 per year as I write this).
View All You can install the complete package or choose which modules to include. For example, the complete installation includes plugins for extracting .RAR files, viewing Adobe DNG files, and the PicaView Windows File Explorer photo previewer—some of which may not interest you.
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The first time you run the program, it asks you to enter an email address and password and to specify whether it's for personal or business use. You can then step through a bunch of setup options, choose a default system folder that the app scans at startup, create a catalog for faster access to all your photos, select a theme (light, silver, or charcoal), and set backup reminders. After this, the startup wizard takes you through a tour of the program's modes and features.
Interface
Like Lightroom, ACDSee is modal—that is, it uses display modes for different activities, such as managing, viewing, or editing your pictures. The modal approach is also used by Photoshop Elements and Lightroom, as well as by Corel Paintshop Pro, another competitor in the budget Photoshop-replacement game. ACDSee 19 displayed properly on my 4K monitor, and touch gestures work well, letting you swipe through images and tap or pinch to zoom. Overall, the interface feels familiar, clear, and quick, but it lacks the polish of an Adobe program and is starting to look dated.I like that the bottom line of the window shows the filename, resolution, and shooting stats. Browser-like back and forward buttons are useful for navigating your collection, as are folder tiles. The program can even perform batch operations, for example, converting file formats or resizing many photos at once. But I was disappointed that there's no zooming with the mouse wheel.
Managing Photos. This is where all your importing, organizing, and outputting happens. From here you can import from devices and disks, and image thumbnails clearly show their file format at the top. Importing options resemble those of ACDSee Pro, letting you choose date ranges, pick folder and backup destinations, delete from media after import, and auto-rotate. No adjustment presets are available at import, however. You can then navigate through a folder tree, or select photos based on size, keyword tags, color labels, or even technical details such as F-stop or ISO.
There are also People and Places options, but they're not automatic: They only work if you specifically tag the images. A couple of smart collections are available: Recently Imported, Recently Modified, and Video. You can add your own using criteria, such as dates and image attributes. You can also save searches for later use.
