Product review
Executive summary

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ACDSee 7

ACDSee 7 photo management software allows you to organize, search, view and share photos and video clips you have stored on your PC. The software comes with tools for correcting common flaws in images, but its real strength lies in the way it lets you quickly manage your photo collection.

Key functionality: ACDSee 7 is a software package designed to manage large number of photos, videos and, in principle, any files. We firmly believe that a photo management software must not change your folder structure, image locations, names, or anything else about photos on your hard disk, or worse: duplicate images to a database of its own. ACDSee 7 does exactly the right thing: it doesn't change anything you have established on your hard disk, and all the information required for searching and categorizing files is added to its own index database. If you move any folders or images in ACDSee, the actions are reflected on the hard disk file system so you can use your other software products independently of what you do in ACDSee.

ACDSee recognizes a large number of file formats: common and uncommon image types, several video formats and digital music types, such as the MP3. When you find a file ACDSee doesn't recognize, you can double-click its thumbnail image and ACDSee will launch the application that manages the file to show you what it contains.

You can browse your photos by following the folder structure you have created on your hard disk, or you can let the software search any files for you, or you can use a feature called selective browsing to locate the photos you want. Selective browsing lets you set a combination of values, for instance, year and rating, and only images that fulfill the criteria will be shown. In theory, selective browsing sounds good, but it is not as intuitive to use as the other functionality in the software.

Although ACDSee 7 primarily is an image manager and viewer, and not a photo-editing product, it is possible to do quite a lot of photo-editing in the software as well. You can quickly correct many common problems in images: remove unnecessary parts, resize, correct color balance, recolor red eyes, adjust contrast and lighting, to name a few features.

There are several options for creating slideshows: a self-running .EXE file that you can run on any PC, a screen saver for Windows, an animated Flash photo show, or a PDF document that includes all the selected photos. If you have a CD drive that can write CDs, you can copy your images and slideshows to a CD.

You can send photos to a friend from ACDSee by email if you are using a client software program, such as Outlook, or Eudora. But there's a better way: you can share your photos on the SendPix online service (30 days for each photo), and the system sends an email message to everyone you want to give access. Sharing photos doesn't get much easier than this. If you have your own web site, you can let ACDSee create web pages from your photos. The software automatically scales the pictures for viewing on the Internet and includes thumbnails, index and navigation.

The software is fast and responsive, an extremely important feature for a product that must manage thousands of photos. ACDSee indexes information about images and all files on your hard disk in its own database, the image catalog. Once you have set the database ‘on’, it works in the background.

Who likes this product: All photographers with large image collections who want a tool for managing their photos will find ACDSee a useful product. Also, photographers who don't intend to learn any more than the minimum about image editing, but want to be able to manage photos and slide shows will find this product a complete package for their needs.

System requirements: A PC running Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP is required. The software itself only needs 100MB of disk space and runs in 256 MB of RAM. A CD drive that can write discs is required if you want to copy your photos on CDs.

Value for money: ACDSee 7 is excellent value for money. In addition to its first-rate photo album management capabilities you can do common image repair tasks with the same software.