ACDSee 1.6 for Mac
"ACDSee is a high speed, full-featured image viewer that displays digital images in high resolution." Ha! Ha! Ha!
There are a few people on this forum (actually, just
one person) who think that Apple's iPhoto software is bad, and ACDSee is way, way better. I didn't comment on that because I hadn't used ACDSee before, but after having used it, I can certainly say that iPhoto is a billion times better than ACDSee. Almost featureless and slower than a snail. I trashed it after 30 minutes of testing.
Click on the image to enlarge
Here goes the review:
First impressions
If you ask me why I like MS Office for Mac, then I'd say that it acts like a Mac software, not a Windows software. And this ACDSee seems to be the Frankenstein crossover between Mac OS X, Mac Classic, and a PC application. It greets you with the Browser window, in which the volume hierarchy is shown on the right and on the left, the contents of the currently selected folder are presented in little 'slides' that eat up lots of border space. I won't even go into the tiny 24x24 buttons that make up the toolbar, which seem to be drawn using MS Paint.
The Browse mode has three modes of showing the images: the first is the Slides you start up with; the second is Borderless, which is in essence the same as slides except for the actual border around each image, and does nothing to help get more out of the screen real-estate; the third mode, Classic, reminds me of some very, very old applications, the PC kind, with a grey beveled outline surrounding every item and its name. It looks horrid when placed on the white background the application uses.
Anti-aliasing and Thumbnails
The thumbnails it shows in that Browse mode are badly scaled often, having that pixilated look, that there is no anti-aliasing used, and that it cannot display the icons of items in more than 32x32.
I managed to turn that horrid border to a minimum and also identified the compression level for the thumbnails. I turned it all the way up to None and reloaded the folder. Even after that, the thumbnails were pretty much the same, although a little better, they were still not on par with the anti-aliased thumbnails that other OS X image viewers have got me used to.
Let's move past that and go into the actual image viewing.
Image viewing
The view mode presents one big window in which to view the images one at a time. By default, the program is set up to show the image at its full size, regardless of how big the window is. This is easily remedied and it also features a Full Screen mode, which is the better choice. There is also the option to resize the window to fit the image, a mind-boggling feature whose use I have yet to grasp. If you have it enabled and open up a series of images of all different sizes, the window will resize vertically and horizontally with every image creating a most pleasant sensation of vertigo.
If you choose to rotate or flip the image, it will ask you whether you want to save the changes when you move on to the next image. Saving the image is done without you setting any options whatsoever, and JPEG files get compressed at a ratio that is beyond your control. What is more interesting is that if you flip a TIFF image for example, it will ask you whether you want to save the changes but it will not actually save anything.
Other View Modes
The Details view is useful when you have a huge number of images in one place and need detailed information about each of them without actually having to know what they look like. The Wide Thumbnail view lists each item on a line, with the name and other information on the right. This is perfect for leaving a great big area that is never used and making those little slide huge without actually showing a bigger thumbnail. And then there's the Small Icons view, which basically shows the contents of the Folder or drive in a Windows manner. If you want an instant reminder of what Windows Explorer looks like and how it arranges those icons, look no further.
The Good
The application does have a nice icon, with the ACDSee eye logo and two pictures that appear to be of the same thing: a butterfly on a yellow flower.
The Bad
So much to choose from I don't even know where to begin. Leaving aside all the minor issues, the program has big problems with resizing images. Any image displayed at a size smaller than the normal one risks getting pixelated and showing artifacts. Such problems in an image viewing application are unacceptable. It is also super-slow. And have they never heard of anti-aliasing?
The Truth
iPhoto is a much better and much faster alternative. For the advanced folks (like me), Aperture is the tool needed. If you want to view images by browsing your file system, then I recommend GraphicConverter -- it's the best, IMHO. For Windows users, even the free IrfanView does a better job.
ACDSee
Linear Mode
