ACDSee is an
image organizer
An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a proje ...
,
viewer, and
image editor
Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they are Digital photography, digital photographs, traditional Photographic processing, photo-chemical photographs, or illustrations. Traditional analog image editing is known ...
program for
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
,
macOS
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
and
iOS
Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...
, developed by
ACD Systems International Inc. ACDSee was originally distributed as a
16-bit application
16-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 16-bit microprocessors.
A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two ...
for
Windows 3.0 and later supplanted by a
32-bit version for
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...
.
ACDSee Pro 6 adds native
64-bit
In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...
support. The newest versions of ACDSee incorporate modern Digital Asset Management tools like Face Detection & Facial Recognition (Ultimate 2019).
ACDSee's main features are speed, lossless
RAW image editing, image batch processing, editing
metadata
Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive ...
(
Exif
Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...
and
IPTC), rating, keywords, and categories, and
geotagging
Geotagging, or GeoTagging, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as a geotagged photograph or video, websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RgSSfeeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data ...
. The image quality can be assessed quickly due to next/previous image caching, rapid RAW image decoding, and support for one-click toggling between 100% and fit screen zoom mode at any point within the image. Most of ACDSee's features can be accessed via
keyboard.
ACDSee displays a
tree view of the file structure for navigation with
thumbnail
Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-o ...
images of the selected
folder, and a preview of a selected image. ACDSee started as an image organizer/viewer, but over time had image editing and RAW development (Pro version) capabilities added. The thumbnails generated by ACDSee are
cached, so that they do not need to be regenerated, and stored on disk as a database.
ACDSee's database can be backed up, and exported/imported as
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
or
binary. Each database and its associated thumbnails can also be loaded and saved as separate entities.
The photo manager is available as a consumer version, and a pro version which provides additional features, and additional image editing capabilities. In 2012, ACDSee Free was released, without advanced features.
[Williams, Mike (11 August 2012)]
"Need a quick-and-easy image viewer? Try ACDSee Free"
BetaNews.com.
ACDSee is pronounced the same as
AC/DC
AC/DC are an Australian rock band formed in Sydney in 1973. Their music has been variously described as hard rock, blues rock and Heavy metal music, heavy metal, although the band calls it simply "rock and roll". They are cited as a formativ ...
.
History
ACDSee was first released in 1994 as a 16-bit application for
Windows 3.1. In 1997 32-bit ACDsee 95 was released for Windows 95. 1999 saw the release of ACDSee 3.0. Version 5.0 was released in 2002, and 7.0 in 2005. Development of this line continues, with version 20.0 released in 2016.
This early version of ACDSee is sometimes known as ACDSee Classic or ACDSee 32.
ACDSee Pro was released on 9 January 2006 aimed at professional photographers. ACD Systems decided to separate its core release, ACDSee Photo Manager, into two separate products; ACDSee Photo Manager, aimed at amateur photography enthusiasts, and ACDSee Pro which would target professionals by adding a new package of feature sets. ACDSee Pro's development team is based out of
Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada's Pacific Ocean, Pacific coast. The city has a population of 91,867, and the Gre ...
and was originally led by Jon McEwan, and more recently by Nels Anvik, who oversaw ACDSee Pro 2.5 through to Pro 5. The original ACDSee software was created by David Hooper, who also added a number of features to ACDSee Pro, such as Lighting correction (formerly known as Shadows and Highlights) and Develop Mode (in version 2.0). ACDSee Pro is written in
C++, with the interface built using
MFC.
Free version
In August 2012, ACD Systems released ACDSee Free, which retains all viewing features for the most common image formats (
BMP,
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...
,
JPEG
JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...
,
PNG,
TGA,
TIFF
Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...
,
WBMP,
PCX,
PIC,
WMF,
EMF); it lacks a thumbnail browser, and support for RAW and
ICO formats.
A reviewer at BetaNews found it "fast, configurable and easy to use".
The version runs on
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
or newer.
"ACDSee Free system requirements"
ACDSee.com. The product was discontinued in August 2013.
See also
* Comparison of image viewers
References
External links
*
{{Authority control
Proprietary image organizers
Windows-only trialware
1994 software