ACDSee Pro

what is ACDsee Photo Studio ? I get their emails with promotional price $50 for PhotoStudio 5.
How it compares to GraphicConverter or Acorn ?

ACDSee Pro is at version 4.2 (744) and works well with High Sierra. It's a familiar layout if you work with the PC version.

ACDSee version 4 is out. Works fine with High Sierra, and is a pretty good replacement for LightRoom, at least as far as indexing images goes.

Acdsee PRO for the MAC OS, does not work on the latest version of the OS. Here is the post and the response I have gotten from Acdsee. This was posted in November 23, 2016. They are still selling the product, that does not work, the Beta that they referred to for version 4, is still not available. They suggested that they would have it out before Christmas, they did not make it. Here is the link for the site where you can buy the product that does not work. Note there is no disclaimer that it wont work with the current MAC OSX. http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee-pro-3-mac I have been very patient waiting for this new version (Of note: Mac OS 10.12.1 Sierra, was released September 20,2016. As a software developer, they should have had it in their hands to verify that it worked before then). We are now in 2017, and it is still not supported. By not supported, what I really mean is it does not work. Not even to just view the pictures you have on your Mac. Any idea when Acdsee will work on a Mac? I have Acdsee MAC Pro 3.7.201 and Mac OS 10.12.1 Sierra. This doesn't work and the answer from support was ... NOT SUPPORTED. Yet, they are still selling this software. $29.95 with no disclaimer that it doesn't yet work with the latest software. I have been a customer since the '80's. Started out with PC's and moved to Mac about 10 years ago. I upgraded my OS about 2 months ago, shortly after that noticed that Acdsee was not working, called support and they said that I should sign up for the Beta for Acdsee Mac Pro 4.0, of course that is not yet available.

ACDsee is an annoying spam-producer. Never subscirbe to their newsletter. You will not be able to get rid of them.

A guy in my digital photo club kept going on and on and on and on about how great ACDSee was. So when I saw it on sale for $49 instead of Aperature's $79, I said okay I'll give it a go. Silly me, I didn't try the demo and I listened to this Windows-user's ranting and raving and just bought it. What a mistake. For starters, it offers me nothing in correction features that were all that much different than iPhoto. Second, the "dark" look just feels cheap. It's not well-implemented like Apple's and Adobe's apps are. Third, the responsiveness sometimes lags, and I'm on a MacPro with 16GB of ram. It's not a lot, but enough to be noticeable. Finally, the interface just feels… wrong. I don't know how to describe it. It's just frustrating and I can't put my finger on why. Really wish I had saved the money and put it toward Aperature. I don't think ACDSee was worth $49, let alone $99. (And they tried to tack on these extra subscription things when I went to purchase.)

I've just tried the Demo of V3 (preparing for whether Aperture continues or not), but can't say I've warmed to this at all. It seems to have less features than even the free offerings from 'darktable' and 'RawTherapee', has nothing in the way of auto corrections (I like to use as a starting point), no second display support (RawTherapee does for free), and no hardware profiles (darktable does, also for free). I think you realise how good Aperture is once you try out the alternatives. For me, this has nothing to offer over the free Raw packages, image quality was not visibly any better, and certainly nothing to convince me to migrate from Aperture. Probably worth considering if you're starting out, or only have a small library, but for me, I think darktable or RawTherapee are better choices if you don't want to spend out on Aperture or LightRoom.

If you have a large collection of photos as you move the mouse wheel it behaves like a beta program.

The current version 1.9 is not much better than the early beta. It is still bug ridden and has minimum image correction tools. It chokes on large tasks. The online manual was ported over from the PC side and does not represent the Mac version in many cases. It was in beta for almost a year and gathered a good following that sent in a huge amount of corrections and suggestions most of which were never implemented or ignored. This version has been out for over a year without any changes or updates. The original following has essentially all fallen away from sheer disappointment and lack of dialog from the developer ACD who remains mum on anything. Many originally spent $170 for the app which has dropped to just $70 to try to get someone to buy it. This could be a great program if ACD paid attention to it but they may do the same thing they did with Canvas for Mac - get people to buy it then drop all development and support.

Years ago ACDSee used to make a pretty good product (Canvas) but it's now going from bad to worse... Even worse, once they have your money they may well stop developing it, like they already did with Canvas, and you may then be in big trouble next time Apple releases a new system... My advice : Stay away from all ACDSee products, this no longer a serious company !

I'M using the windows version, which works like a charm, however the mac version is rather disapointing. First of all the batch is not working, no matter what i try, it just keeps saying "Batching 1 items" and there it stays. I'm a web graphic designer and I use the batch processing for resizing or renaming photos, and none of those are working. Instead I tested a freeware version of a program called XnViewMP, which looks and feels like Acdsee and damn it works right out of the box

...MAYBE if they ported this to Mac OS before Graphic Converter came into existence...

Maybe this is the first mac app that I've ever seen which cannot run in any other language environment except English...

Well, now that it's out of beta it should be no surprise they want money for it. Which would be fine if they didn't still list it as free on Mac Update. The listing should be changed to reflect the commercial status of the app now. That said, it's certainly less expensive than other premium photo workflow editors; whether it's as good as Adobe Lightroom or Capture One remains to be seen. I haven't seen a review of the finished product yet - and reviews of the beta are out of date.

is this the way we are supposed to going in the future ? this app is labelled "free" without any announcement of different feature levels (trial full). the point is, as soon as you start the installation, you are asked for a license code !! is this the next station after the overwhelming mankind development represented by the Mac App Store ? WHERE ARE WE GOING ???

Release notes would be helpful. Otherwise, it's all but impossible to know what has changed from the previous version. In preliminary tests it no longer crashes on my Canon RAW files, however, so that much, at least, has improved. However, though there is a decent selection of editing tools, the sliders lack any fine adjustment capability. All you can do is drag the sliders; you cannot move them with the arrow keys in controlled increments or manually enter a value. These are essential options, without which ACDSee Pro will remain a crude imitation of real pro software.

Previous versions of ACDSee created some controversy IIRC by including in the license EULA conditions that restricted the type of images (presumably pR0n) that could be managed with the app. While that is not an issue here, I would never even consider an app that told me what photos I could or couldn't use it with (it's a free-speech issue.) Has this policy been changed?

Well, ASDSee Pro is finally taking shape. It now has a respectable selection of image adjustment tools, conveniently arrayed in a left-hand side column/pane, in the Process mode. There are two other modes available: The Manage mode has a file browser column/pane on the left of a thumbnail image grid display, and an Organize/Properties column/pane on the right; and the View mode displays the selected image with a film strip thumbnail pane below. These modes imitate two of the modules from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, splitting the functions of Lightroom's Library module into two separate modes - no doubt to avoid copywriter infringement issues. Be warned, though, that ACDSee does not handle RAW images well, bogging down with every operation you try to apply. In fact, it cannot handle RAW XMP data at all. So, if you take pictures in RAW, ACDSee Pro is not for you. If you shoot JPEGs or TIFFs it will handle those respectably. ACDSee Pro has limited metadata editing capabilities, keeping track via a database rather than the image side-car (XMP) file that Lightroom and other RAW image processing apps use. As a result, as with Photoshop, editing is not lossless and you need to save a processed file as a copy if you don't want to overwrite the original when you save the file. ACDSee does not compete directly with Graphic Converter, which has a different tool set entirely, more like Photoshop lite. Nor will it compete with Aperture or Lightroom since it cannot (at the moment at least) handle RAW files, even though it imitates their editing capabilities to some extent. Unless RAW image handling capability is added, it's hard to see what niche ADCSee Pro intends to fill. Even iPhoto can handle RAW files - and it comes free with every new Mac. Of course ACDSee has the advantage, in my opinion, of not using a proprietary image catalogue, so that your files may be easily accessed with other applications. Like Graphic Converter and Adobe Bridge, it basically uses the Finder's file system to manage your photos. Given that OS X has native support for the RAW format, it should not be too difficult to have ADCSee piggyback on that ability. Given the importance of the RAW image format to professional and serious amateur photographers, ACDSee will not deserve the Pro label until it can handle RAW. As it stands, it can be said that it has serious potential; it remains to be seen if that potential will be realized. And then, once it's out of beta, price will determine how widely it is adopted. Under $100, with support for RAW images, ACDSee will be an attractive option. It it costs much more than that, Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture will be the better choice. ACDSee Pro can fill a useful place in the market in that it can edit images in the manner of Aperture, Lightroom and iPhoto but utilizes a Finder-like file management model like Graphic Converter and Bridge. As far as I know, no affordable program fills that niche, accept, perhaps, Photoshop Elements. Though Elements can handle RAW photos using the Adobe RAW plug-in, just as Photoshop does, workflow with the plug-in architecture is not as fluid as in Lightroom and Aperture. So ACDSee can be a unique and useful application - once it develops RAW file support.

Wow, I remember we bought ACDSee a while back for a graphics department at Morgan Stanley. They wanted something that could be used on Windows and Mac. I didn't think it was any better than the Mac only options (GraphicConverter), but it was usable. What the heck happened? Why is it so expensive - and lacking so many fundamental features? FAIL Don Montalvo, TX

At the current state, this is just some early draft of a 'pro' photo manager application. It got no more features than Finder+Preview combo... Oh, I am sorry! You can actually crop, resize, annotate or fine tune colors, brighness, levels, sharpness etc. in PREVIEW, and you can't do this in 'ACDSee Pro' (except limited batch operations). It is also definitely NOT faster than iPhoto when you want to browse large libraries (at least on my Macbook Pro and my 15k+ photos collection). And please don't blame for my sarcastic review - I was happy user of a few generations of ACDSee some years ago, when 'I was a PC'. I know, that you can do better.