ACDSee 5

ACDSee 5 review

More and more photographers are capturing their images with digital cameras which means shooting hundreds of images and storing the pictures. Finding the right picture again can be a major headache - of course you can create index thumbnail prints (today’s contact sheet equivalent), but why make more work for yourself when there are applications that will help you manage your pictures?

ACDSee 5 offers a fully customisable interface

One such application is ACDSee 5, a versatile image management application. It’s easy to navigate interface belies the immense power that this latest version offers. If you’re accustomed to working with Windows Explorer, then you will be up and running in next to no time. On the left hand side is Navigation Pane which is similar to the Windows Tree structure. Click on a folder and thumbnail images of the folder’s contents are displayed in the right pane. This process is extremely fast. ACDSee creates a cache database of all the folders you have viewed - subsequent viewing of these folders is almost instant. Click on an image and a preview is displayed under the directory tree. The preview is not much bigger than the thumbnail image, but it can be scaled up and down at the expense of either the Navigation or File Pane. Fortunately, the entire interface can be customised to suit your taste. I prefer to turn the Preview Pane off and double click on an image, this opens it in full screen mode. Use the arrow, or the Page Up/Down keys, to move to the next or previous image.


Folders tab displays your systems drives	Catalog your Photo CD collection

Above the Navigation Pane are a series of Tabs, these include Photo Discs, Favourites, Search, Calendar, Categories, Folders, and Albums. Use the Photo Discs tab to create a catalogue of images stored on a CD or other removable media. For a full 650mb CD, creating the thumbnail previews takes about 5 minutes. An image database is stored on your hard drive which occupies approx., 28mb per CD. The advantage here is that you don’t need to have the CD inserted in order to view the thumbnail files.


Albums and Categories are similar but have different uses

Use Albums to create collections of pictures - add as many Albums as you require. One problem I found when creating a new Album, is that when you rename it, it disappears. The problem is cured by adding the .ais extension to the name (I had to find this out for myself - ACD Systems are aware of this problem and will put an update patch on their web site). Pictures that are added to an Album are left in their original location, you are just creating shortcut links to the pictures. Albums can be viewed as a slide show, or printed as either a contact sheet or as individual prints. The Category tab works in a similar fashion to Albums, you add pictures to a category and they can be viewed as a slide show, but the advantage of a Category is that you can view several categories at a time and also create sub-categories (with Albums you can only view one at any time). Again, you can create as many categories as you need and give each a unique name.

The bold numbers indicate pictures were taken on that day

The Calendar tab enables you to select a Year, Month, or Day and view all the pictures that were taken within those periods. On the day setting you can even view pictures according to the time you took them, assuming of course you have set your camera’s time. The date is extracted from the image Metadata by default, or you can select the file modification date or the ACD DataBase date.

Search for named pictures or keywords, you have to remember to name the files!

The last tab is Search. Searches can be made on file names or on Keywords you may have added. Unfortunately, ACDSee Keywords are not compatible with the industry standard (the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), and Photoshop (File Info)), although ACDsee keywords work in a similar fashion. Searches are very fast, depending on the amount of images to be searched, there are advanced options for refining searches according to Date, Author, Image properties or Metadata. The one thing that you have to do is to change the filenames from DSC_1234 to something more meaningful