you could also use the 'keywords' instead of the 'tags' (categories) in a similar way as i mentioned above.
-nudone
Sure, except with keywords, you have to type them all in manually. Just imagine the task of trying to tag 2,000+ pictures doing it that way... it really is no alternative to real, draggable tags.
well, i doubt this is going to be any kind of great revalation but i'm sticking with acdsee.
i've spent a bit of time with 'imatch' but it just feels like something i would have used on windows 95. i'm sure it must be good for metadata but i wouldn't recommend it for anything else.
-nudone
Nothing wrong with sticking with what you know and like
. And I'm surprised at your impression of iMatch. It must not be as great as I thought, then! Anyone got anything else to say about iMatch? I can't believe it's THAT bad. I need to give my system a break with installs/uninstalls so I'm not keen on trying it out, especially since I'm quite happy with APE's organizational component for the time being. It just works very, very well. It's got the most powerful, intuitive tagging I have found anywhere, ever.
and, photoshop elements doesn't really do it for me either. just like adobe album i would say (if you disregard the editor part). yep, the tagging kind of looks funky and nice but i don't really see how it improves greatly upon what acdsee does. if anything, it feels claustrophobic and too restrictive in how you've got to work with it. i guess that's great if you fit into it's way of thinking.
-nudone
I really can't speak for APE's editor as I've never used it. I stick to the organizer part and have yet to check out the editor. From what I've heard and read, however, the editor is at least as amazing as the organizer. Anyway.. I have no doubt that ACDSee is more powerful.
Especially when considering the Pro version. If you need that sort of power there is no doubt you will be better served with ACDSee than with APE. Although generally Adobe meant to target more of a beginner/intermediate crowed with APE, just about no review/impression I've read ever fails to mention that APE is very well suited for everyone from beginner to advanced/pro photographer because its tool-set is so diverse and useful. Given the greatness of the organizer alone, I have no doubt about the truth of this assertion.
Also, I must defend APE here. To say that "the tagging kind of looks funky and nice" and that you "don't really see how it improves greatly upon what acdsee does" is to do APE a great injustice. I am completely serious when I say that APE
RAPES ACDSee when it comes to image organization. It's not just the funkiness and cuteness of APE's interface and the nice little details like giving even the tags themselves thumbnails.. it's the sheer power of it. Comparing APE's tagging/organization system to ACDSee's is hard. I wanted to make an analogy but couldn't come up with anything that would fit. One example: I never found a way to assign multiple created tags to one image or multiple images in ONE STEP. In APE, it's as simple and as intuitive as clicking once on the tags that you wish to use, and then simply dragging them over to either just one image or a group of images you selected before. Let go of the mouse button, and your selection is tagged. When I tried to do that in ACDSee, each time I clicked on a tag merely to select it, ACDSee would actually change the display of the Image Well to display only the images using that tag. The same thing can be achieved with APE, but it's done by clicking the checkbox to the left of each tag. That way, you can either just select tags for use by dragging OR you can use the "display only images with this tag" checkbox. That in itself beats the living shit out of ACDSee in terms of tagging/organization, but there is more. APE distinguishes between
categories and
tags. A tag can have no items below it while a category can. With ONE option from the right-click context menu, you can turn any tag into a category and any category into a tag, if this is needed. This is extremely handy because sometimes you will realize that a tag you made would actually be better off being a category because you can fine-tune that particular item even more by adding sub-items. Example: let's say you create a tag called New York for pictures you shot in NYC while you were there on a trip. Now you tag pictures from that trip and suddenly realize that it would be even better to sub-divice the NYC shots into categories like.. "Trip to Statue of Liberty", "Empire State Building Visit", "Central Park", etc. If you created "NYC" as a tag initially, you cannot create sub-items of it. But here's where that feature comes in. Right-click, simply select "turn tag into category" or whatever, and boom. Now NYC is a category instead of merely a tag, and you can create SUB TAGS for that category, labeling them with the example items such as I mentioned above. ACDSee has nothing like this as far as I could tell. There's more. APE has image stacks. If you have similar shots, like burst shots or simply very similarly composed images of the same subject, with similar angles and light conditions and everything, you can create a stack of that so that not all thumbnails show up when browsing your image database, but only one of them that will be representative of that image group. Only the top image will show and the rest will be shown only by edges on the side, on multiple levels, below that top image, to indicate that that's a stack and not just a single image. With context-menu right click commands, you can immediately stack and unstack groups of photos. APE also makes use of its own feature by creating automatic stacks in case you choose to use automatic red eye fixing, because it will first make a copy of the image, apply its red-eye fix to one of the copies and leave the original alone, then create a stack of the fixed and untouched image, leaving you with both the fixed version and the original that you shot. It's beautiful. It doesn't screw with your work by simply messing with the image and then asking you if you want to accept or reject the changes... it just does it and leaves you with options by saving BOTH images. That's very smart in my book. I think I could go on, but this should be enough. I repeat: APE kills ACDSee, even the Pro version, 10 times over in terms of image organization, which, to be honest, is sad and disappointing for ACDSee, especially considering that it's targeted primarily at advanced photographers and pros.
Also... claustrophobic and too restrictive in how you've got to work with it? I don't know. It does rely on tagging, and heavily so, but how that is restrictive I don't know. Claustrophobic? Please tell me how. I'd love to hear to see another view.
i'll admit i want 'power' and the most options available at all times and i can appreciate that that isn't going to suit everyone.
-nudone
That's true. You probably do have more options with ACDSee. Also, I'm not just trying to say ACDSee sucks and APE rocks. I know better than to do that. We all know ACDSee is a great application. It just boils down to what you primarily use it for and what style of organization you use. If you're a tagging person, there is no question that APE kills ACDSee. If you prefer folder-based hierarchical organization, ACDSee probably is the better choice. That's not to say ACDSee doesn't have tagging features, but compared to APE's, they simply suck. Also, I have to say I greatly miss a duplicate image finder in APE, which ACDSee does have and it's great. Also, ACDSee starts up in a fraction of the time that APE takes, although after the initial startup APE is very, very fast because of prefetching, I suppose.
i'm just glad i got used to using acdsee when i did. it was the right choice for me.
-nudone
Glad to hear you found your baby
. As for me, I'm still looking. While I think APE is great, it isn't perfect. What is? And ACDSee fails miserably by my standards of image organization, as good and great as it is/may be disregarding that particular function. It's too bad.
now come, join me brothers, and let us all gather around and thank ACDSystems for creating ACDSee Pro.
-nudone
I'll leave this to those addressed :p
