ACDSee for Mac a dud ... beware.

[Keith]

I don't think many people actually use their software here but I've been a fan of it for a long time ... it does most of what LR does and more and has always been pretty reasonably priced. It also has a much better interface IMO.

That was until I switched to a Mac form my windows 7 Toshiba laptop and downloaded a trial version of their Mac Pro 3 version which is a complete turkey by any standard! It's lacking in a lot of functions that Pro 8 for windows has and to kill it completely every time I attempt to open a raw file from my 240 the program instantly shuts down and no amount of messing around with settings changes it. This is kind of weird because according to ACDSee the program supports Leica raw. I sent them an email describing the problem three days ago but they have yet to respond!

I guess with Apple being a fairly small percentage of the market they haven't really made much effort with their Mac version and may not even be aware of the issues I had with the Leica files. Luckily the 240 came with Lightroom which misses out on few functions that Pro 8 offers but most of those seem to be covered by plugins that are free or quite cheap so I guess Lightroom is it!

 

[lawrence]

Years ago ACDSee (for PC) used to be my photo manager and, like you, I loved the interface and functionality. However, over the years as they added more features it became progressively less stable until I finally gave up on it. Good luck with that support query, as I recall their support is completely hopeless, which was another reason for dumping it.

 

[rscheffler]

Did you switch to Mac for hardware or software reasons? I wonder if a reasonable answer would be to run a Windows partition from which to run ACDSee and other Windows apps you previously used? Sure, it might be a pain for certain workflow aspects...

 

[Godfrey]

ACDSee has never been a player in the OS X market. I'm surprised you were not aware of this.

The OS X market space in the photography and creative arts sectors is actually quite comparable in size to the Windows market, with industry reports showing that in some geographic areas it has the majority of seats, but the producers of ACDSee have never been all that interested to produce a quality product for the OS X platform. They've mostly focused on the lower-cost, high-volume amateur photographic market on Windows platforms.

Photo Mechanic is the most commonly used alternative to Lightroom for professional users who need fast image ingestion, sorting, organizing, IPTC annotation, etc. It works well with both Lightroom and Photoshop too. There are excellent implementations for both OS X and Windows platforms.

I just use Lightroom as it is inexpensive enough, fast enough, and full-featured enough to handle all but a small fraction of my image management and processing needs.

G