ACDSee 5 in full screen mode is great for image editing. Full screen display is nearly instantaneous and it makes very short work of culling through hundreds and hundreds of images. I have passed on upgrading ACDSee. I don't really have a reason why. I heard of the software being full of bugs, but that really wasn't it. I had always been very happy with 5 and I only used it for full screen editing.
I needed to edit a ton of images this weekend and didn't have ACDSee installed on anything. Both of my home workstations are newer and my laptop is newer. Just never got around to it. Pulled out my ACDSee CD, and there it was. A huge crack. Asked a friend for a recommendation as I really didn't want to go to ACDSee 8 and he turned me on to XnView, a free for non commercial use, $40 shareware viewer available at XnView.com.
XnView supports over 400 formats and even supports the RAW files from Nikon and Kodak cameras, though the Kodak .dcr is not listed. Best of all, full screen mode was nearly instantaneous. XnView offers a tabbed interface that will keep large previews open which I found useful in a few instances. Though I haven't spent much time with the software yet it certainly does look like a keeper. And at $40 is a good bit less expensive than ACDSee.
Powered by Zoundry
Filed under: Software
