ACDSee Ultimate 8 offers pro photography features like workflow management, cataloging, and archiving. It also sends email and creates CDs, DVDs, PDFs, and slideshows. A fully customizable workspace is organized around Modes: Manage, View, and Edit/Develop, plus 365 Mode, which integrates ACDSee Ultimate 8 with related software. New features include Pixel Targeting, PicaView, 1-Step EQ, Smart Indexer, and SeeDrive.
Pros
Quick setup: ACDSee Ultimate 8's Quick Start Guide helps you convert databases, set preferences, catalog files, or learn more.
Extensive editing: While the app excels at organizing and managing your image catalogs and databases, it's also a top-quality image editor with layers, palettes, and filters, plus quick fixes for issues like red-eye.
SeeDrive: The new SeeDrive manages your cloud folders and shares, including privacy settings, from a sidebar window. Like ACDSee Ultimate 8's other windows and sidebars, the SeeDrive window can be closed, minimized, undocked, or floated.
Rights management: ACDSee Ultimate 8 manages pro-level EXIF metadata, such as Intellectual Gene, IPTC Code, Job Identifier, Credit Line, Copyright Notice, and Rights Usage Terms.
Cons
Registration and activation: Some of ADCSee's features require an active account, but you shouldn't have to provide a phone number to create one. Initially, ACDSee Ultimate 8 wouldn't recognize our new account when we tried to activate it.
Bottom Line
ACDSee Ultimate 8 brings a lot to a crowded software sector. This powerful and easy-to-use suite challenges tools that cost more -- sometimes quite a bit more.
Editors' note: This is a review of the full version of ACDSee Ultimate 8.