ACDSee is an image viewer that’s been well known since the days of IrfanView. ACDSee had quite a few followers for its superior features back then, but IrfanView was generally known more for being freeware. ACDSee 2 Pro has moved from being just an image viewer. This new version boats of great photo handling features for the professional photographer.
The first thing ACDSee 2 Pro does is catalogue all your images when you first run it. The interface is surrounded by sidebars, leaving only a small area to actually view images and thumbnails.
Photos are shorted by time and can be viewed through the calender view. The other useful filtering feature is the Organised sidebar, which allowes you to display photos from only a particular camera.
A quick preview appears when you hover the pointer over an image. You can enter image editing mode by double clicking on any of the photos. ACDSee 2 Pro even loads videos; you can not only view them, but also convert them using the codecs on your machine.
Images and videos can even be burnt onto CD and DVD. Wizerds are available to create Video CDs as well. Other than that, you can even export your photos as HTML albums, PDF, or PowerPoint presentations.
Memory consumption was well under 30MB while browsing images, and only spiked by a few (5 to 10) MB while opening images.
Other than its clumsy interface, ACDSee 2 Pro seems a nice software, untill you get to knowabout the price tag - $129.99. It’s still much cheaper than Adobe Lightroom, which is more than twice its price. It has quite a few features that can be compared to those of Lightroom, but it doesn’t match its simplicity.
People looking for image viewers can stick to free ones like IrfanView, as ACDSee 2 Pro has gone far beyond that. Users can’t afford Lightroom might want to consider ACDSee 2 Pro.
