ACD Systems ACDSee 8 review

The last time we looked at the ACDSee Photo Manager it came as part of a suite of three different programs called the ACD PowerPack 7.

The Photo Manager was an album program that enabled you to organise and sort through your collections of photos, and it came with two separate programs that provided basic photo-editing features and printing options. Those three programs have now been merged into a single product, and the price has been slashed from £67 to just £30.

The integration of all three programs into one is certainly a welcome move, as is the price reduction. ACDSee 8 also includes some useful new features, such as a Quick Search option that enables you to search for text in filenames, keywords associated with photos and category labels that you can assign to your images.

We like the improved HTML Album feature, which can help you turn a set of photos automatically into a web gallery that you can put on your website. The new version also includes improved options for saving and backing up your photo library, such as the Sync command that keeps copies of your photos in a separate folder elsewhere on a network or external storage device.

For editing individual images ACDSee 8 includes a new Photo Repair tool, which enables you to remove blemishes such as scratches and tears on old photos or spots on the subject's skin. Individually these tools work quite well, although collectively they don't come anywhere near the sheer photo-editing power provided by rivals such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements. To be fair, though, at just £30 ACDSee 8 is about half the price of those other programs, so it's a little unreasonable to criticise it for being less powerful.

On the other hand we feel entirely justified in disliking the program's interface. The editing mode is relatively straightforward, as it simply displays the chosen picture and a basic toolbar that contains the main editing tools. However, the main Photo Manager mode is a bit of a mess. Your photos are previewed in the central part of the screen, while two sets of panels run down the left and right-hand sides of the screen. The Task pane on the right-hand side displays a list of options, such as the organise pane and the search pane, but when you select one of these options the interface seems to change almost at random to show different sets of panes and panels. When we tried to revert back to the original Task pane we found that the list of available options had changed - sometimes options vanished, and at other times new options appeared. There's a reset layout option in the program's View menu, which at least enables you to start again from scratch, but the musical chairs interface is not much fun to work with.

As a low-cost photo manager ACDSee 8 is worth buying if you don't want to shell out for one of its more expensive rivals. However, the interface really needs a makeover before we can recommend it without reservation.