ACDSee

[dheaton]

Thanks for the info, that is good to know

I have been looking at the ACDsee 8 the last couple of days and it looks very good to me.  Much easier to use than Iview or Imatch.  Looks like it has all the things needed.  There is a Pro version coming out in two weeks.  Has anyone had any experience with the acdsee version 8?

David

[Patrick Cox]

Yes, I have tried ACDSee and there a lot of things that I like about it.  However currently it does a terrible job of rendering CR2's (at least for me) and I don't believe it writes Keywords.  But hopefully the Pro version will fix all of this.  I will definitely be taking a look.

[AlanDunne]

One thing to note about ACDSee, at least up to version 7. They do not support IPTC nor XMP metadata. ALL metadata is thus private by default and cannot be shared with other DAM applications inlcuding Bridge (and Photoshop). See "The DAM Book" for a discussion on this.

Perhaps ACDSee8 is different, and I believe the "pro" version is suppossed to support IPTC at least.

Cheers ... Alan

[Marc St.Onge]

I just posted a message in the DNG section -- tried using ACDSee 5 and it corrupted the DNG file just trying to do a rotation to the preview.  FYI

Marc

[lm13579]

ACDSee 8.0 and ACDSee Pro are both out now with a number of enhancements.  The two products can be compared with each other at:
http://files.acdsystems.com/english/acdseepro/manuals/acdseepro-comparison-matrix.pdf

On the good side, IPTC data vieweing and editing has been added as a feature.  In ACDSee 8.0 you can edit the IPTC data for a file one at a time.  With Pro you can batch set IPTC data on a number of files.  I love how fast ACDSee is at viewing pictures.  You can flip through a lot of pictures really fast.  It also has lots of support for EXIF info as well as it's own native database which supports keywords, captions, rating, notes & categories.  I've used the tool for years for its fast viewing capability.

On the downside:
* I find the IPTC keyword feature to be klunky.  For example, to you have to drill down into the batch set utility if you want to set keywords for a number of files.  In iView ProMedia3 it is a simply drag-and-drop to the keywords pane on the left.  In ACDSee Pro when doing a batch set the master keyword list is in random order not alphabetical.
* Can't read or write IPTC keywords to DNG files.
* There is a bug in the batch set dialog when using the "Recently Used" keyword feature.  If you aren't careful you can corrupt the IPTC keywords in a lot of files really fast.
* There is a powerful search engine but once you create the search criteria you can't save it.  The next time you want to search the same you have to recreate the search criteria

[peterkrogh]

Thanks for the information.
Peter