Review: ACDSee Pro 2 for Mac photo manager plays catch-up but isn't there yet
ACDSee Pro is a feature-rich photo-management and photo-processing app aimed at serious photographers. ACDSee Pro for Windows, now at version 6, is fast and flexible, and competes with other big-league programs such as Adobe Lightroom. The much newer Mac version, ACDSee Pro 2 ($100), resembles its older Windows sibling in many positive ways, but it's not as mature.
Manage mode
ACDSee Pro 2 has three modes: Manage, View, and Develop. With its easy-to-use tools for "tagging" (rating), labeling, and applying keywords to images, ACDSee Pro's Manage mode is definitely the program's strong suit.
In ACDSee Pro, the image browser, in a pane on the left of the screen, displays your computer’s folder hierarchy. Click a folder to view its images in the center of your screen. No need for a special import.
Like similar modes in iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom, ACDSee Pro 2's Manage mode lets you view thumbnails, find images in almost any way you can think of, select images and edit metadata, and, of course, delete images. But like Google's freeware app Picasa, ACDSee Pro does not require you to import images in order to view them. Instead, it relies on your computer's native file system for basic organization; to view images, you simply navigate your way through the folder pane on the left and click a folder that contains images.
Because ACDSee Pro 2's batch-processing feature provides access both to image-adjustment presets and to file-manipulation commands such as copy, move, and resize, ACDSee makes it possible to do in one step a series of actions that most other Mac programs—including Lightroom and Aperture—do in two. Admittedly, the user interface for ACDSee Pro's batch-processing feature is a bit geeky. It's more like the Mac OS X Automator utility than Aperture's lift and stamp commands—that is, the user interface makes you think like a programmer rather than like an artist. And the batch-processing user interface is the closest thing ACDSee Pro has to an export option, something I found hard to get used to. Still, once you figure it all out, the batch workflow can be flexible and powerful.
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