Digital Home Thoughts: ACDSEE 7.0 Power Pack: Powerful and Refined

If you've never used ACDSee before, here's what you need to know: it's fast. Very fast. Over the years, they've kept the speed (though some complained that version 6 was slow) and continued to add new features. I have to admit that in the previous version, I didn't dig into the application very much - but with version 7.0 I wanted to understand everything that it can do. I've found myself using it more and more, and Picasa/PhotoImpact less and less.

ACDSee - The Heart and Soul
So what does the Power Pack come with? The core application is, of course, ACDSEE - the viewer and organizational tool. It offers a wide variety of import options, though I tend to just use Windows Explorer to create a new folder in the My Pictures directory and drag the images over. I use ACDSEE to batch rename them all, which is very handy. As a viewer, it's second to none in terms of speed and ease of use. It also supports batch resizing, HTML album exports, CD burning, ZIP management, and dozens of other features I haven't yet explored.


Figure 1: The ACDSee 7 interface.

It's a very full-featured application - a couple of weeks ago I was organizing my photos and realized how completely screwed up some of the collections were. Somehow a few years ago I managed to get the file stamp out of sync with the actual photo time, so my albums were out of order - and for a Type A organization freak like me, that's traumatic. ACDSEE 7 allowed me to do something amazing: change the file date stamp based on the EXIF data of the photo! It took a fair bit of time to massage the photos back into sync, but I was blown away that I was able to perform such a nuanced tweak that made a huge difference in the way my photos were organized. ACDSEE was worth a fortune to me that day.

Applications crashing on Windows XP is a rarity these days, but I've had ACDSee 7.0 crash on me more than I'd like - I'd say on average once a week. I can't find a consistant reason as to why it crashes, but I'd like to see more focus put on stability in the future.