Good image management features and convenient image editor
Written: Aug 31 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: image categorization and search, easy to use common editing functions, flexible image printing
Cons: some inconsistencies between features, not as stable as I'd like. Difficult tech support
The Bottom Line: I recommend this for many image management, editing, and printing needs
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| davidbiesack's Full Review: ACD Systems ACDSee PowerPack 5.0 Full Version for ... |
I needed software to manage my digital picture collection (which grows pretty quickly). I did not like the Adobe product. ACDSee PowerPack provides a good image organizer. You can define your own categories and subcategories such as People with subcategories of Family, Friends, etc. and easily assign pictures to multiple categories. You can then search for pictures by combining categories or folders. ACDSee easily imported my existing picture collection.
Basic image viewing is very convenient, even more so than the excellent freeware image viewer, IrfanView. It is very easy to zoom and pan high resolution images with the keyboard (i.e. + to zoom in, - to zoom out, arrow keys to pan).
You can also create image CD's and web pages. I don't use this much, but it was competent in how it created. Missing is a feature to fit images to the screen size in web pages (since many of my pictures are high resolution and don't fit, but I don't want to resize them.)
The FotoCanvas editor is fairly complete. Not as full featured as Adobe PhotoShop Elements, but decent. Intuitive crop feature, good color and exposure correction, despeckle, etc. All make for a complete enough photo retouching product. However, the red-eye elimination feature does
not work very well; I use PhotoShop for that.
FotoSlate provides good picture printing capabilities. The
UI is not very intuitive but once you figure it out, it is
easy to print custom sized prints. One nice feature is the ability to crop from within FotoSlate, so you do not have to edit and save a cropped version of the picture before printing. It has common print sizes (5x7, 8x10) for cropping. This is nice for me because my camera takes images with an aspect ratio which does not match print sizes.
ACDSee has some flaws. To perform operations on images (printing, create a CD, create a web page, etc.), you put them in an "image basket". However, once you put an image in the basket, you can't use the basket to return to the image (i.e. to edit/crop it, etc.) This makes it hard to use if you select pictures from multiple folders. To get around this, I create temporary categories instead and simply add
pictures to the temporary categories. ACDSee should fix the product so the "Image Basket" is simply a special category instead of a separate UI feature - it would be more consistent. (In fact, for burning pictures to a CD, they do use a special category.)
I've had some stability problems. Frequently, while running the viewer, when I press Ctrl-E to edit a picture, FotoCanvas crashes before opening. A second attempt to run it usually works. (I've got a clean Windows XP system, no viruses or adware/malware.
Overall, I like ACDSee PowerPack. It meets most of my needs and does so fairly well.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
davidbiesack
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Reviews written: 1
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