Hi there… as promised, here is my first detailed DAM review. In this episode, we take a look at Pro 2 which is a DAM application by ACDSee geared towards the professional photographer. So… here we go!

Application	Version	Review Date	Price	Review By	Technology
ACDSee Pro 2	2.0 (b219)	April 6, 2008	$129	Andy	PC (MAC via Parallels)
Website	http://www.acdsee.com

General Overview

ACDSee Pro 2 Photo Manager (herein called Pro 2), is touted on their website as:

“…the most powerful software platform for viewing, processing, editing, organizing and publishing your photos.”

This certainly caught my attention and therefore, I downloaded and installed the 30 day demo and started exploring and playing. Now, I should mention that I’ve been a fan of ACDsee for a long time having used their photo “manager” back when it was nothing more than a Windows photo viewer for Windows 95 (ie: ACDsee 1.0). Over the years, I continued to use the product but eventually moved away from it as it gained too many functions that weighed it down as a simple image viewer (I had discovered Irfanview…). So, as I waited for the demo to download, I was hopeful that this newest product would still contain the quickness of that simple viewer along with the advanced functionality needed by digital photographers to manage their growing collections… I am happy to say that (for the most part) Pro 2 delivers on both of these wishes.

Installation

The installation of the product went very smoothly. You are first presented with the usual license agreement dialog followed by a dialog with the choice to install as a trial or as a full product (requires the license code).

You then can choose to install all program options or pick and choose which items to install by using the custom options dialog.

As you can see, there are a lot of options shown here including whether or not to install:

• the Showroom (allows you to build and run desktop slideshows),
• the Device Detector (Launch Pro 2 when a memory card is inserted)
• certain Archive Plug-ins (used to view archive files like .zip, .rar and .tar)
• extra Command Extensions (ability to upload to flickr, smugmug and Tivo!)
• extra Image Plug-ins (to view formats such as .ico, .pcd, .djvu images)

The final installation screen will ask you if you’d like to associate file extensions to Pro 2. Your settings here will depend on how you wish to use the product. For me, I chose Custom to pick and choose which file types I want to open/browse with Pro 2. Since I’m not using Pro 2 to manage my music collection, I chose to only include photo extensions. But, the ability to manage all your files with a single product is a nice option - photos, music, videos, .pdf files and fonts can all be keyworded and searched from within Pro 2.

Choosing Next finishes the installation and brings up the file association box to set your “open with” commands within Windows. I actually turned off all file associations and shell commands as I want to continue to use Irfanview for all my quick viewing needs when opening images from Windows.

Finally, the installation finished and I was able to run the program. A fast, easy and painless installation process.

User Interface (GUI)

The main User Interface in Pro 2 is broken down into a number of panes and windows… and is customizable to a pretty good degree.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the main screen is broken into 4 parts: the Folders/Calendar/Favorites pane, the Main Thumbnail pane, the Organize/Properties/Catalog/IPTC pane and the Toolbar pane. Some GUI features:

• The GUI uses the now “in vogue” grey/black/white color scheme that really allows you to focus in on the images and tends to be not as distracting as an “all white” background sometimes is. *Edit 4-12* John correctly let me know that you can choose from 4 color schemes including a windows XP based scheme.
• You cannot modify the colors, fonts or font size of the GUI or pane items.
• You can “move” or dock/undock the individual panes on the screen and move them around to suit a specific workflow step. For example, in the image below, I undocked the calendar panel from the Favorites/Folders pane and moved it towards the center of the window. Those arrows in the screenshot represent docking points in the Gui… drag the panel over a docking arrow and it will automatically dock the panel in place :

• You can save different workspaces to get different looks depending on what task you might be working on. For quick photo culling, you might choose a GUI that looks like this:

• and for keywording and general catalog editing, you might want one that looks like this:

• This allows for a variety of different views that suits the stage of the workflow perfectly. One bug I ran into: when switching between workspaces, the program does not retain the size of the thumbnails you have set for that workspace. For example, when I switched from the mini-thumb mode above to the property edit mode above and then back to the mini-thumb workspace, the thumbnail size remained large and I had to manually move the slider to the correct size even though I had saved the workspace with the thumbnails set to a mini size. Hopefully, the thumbnail size will be retained in a new version of the program because this bug diminishes the usefulness of this feature. (I have submitted a bug report).

Metadata Handling

The photo above also demonstrates that you have access to a number of database and IPTC metadata shown very conveniently in the Organize/Properties pane. Organize allows you quickly display images that are placed into categories or by assigned rating. The categories are user defined and can be used to quickly display a group of photos that all belong to that specific category. For example, if I wanted to see all images with a cat in it, I would create the category: Cat and then drag and drop any photo that has a cat into that category. This is a manual process and must be done for any image you wish to include in the category. The following photo shows the result of clicking the cat category:

As you can see in the above example, I have only a few categories created for this demo.. but this is a nice way to quickly and easily find your images. You can also create these categories automatically using data from EXIF, IPTC and/or XMP fields. I’ll get to this in a moment..

There are other options to view images in your database from the Organize pane: Ratings and Auto Categories. Both of these options are populated automatically as images are either imported into the database (auto categories) or settings are applied to your photos (ratings). When you choose to view say photos with a rating of 4, it will search and show you entries from the entire catalog (not just a subset of the images you were currently viewing)… I’d love to see an option added that allows you to restrict these to just the images you were currently viewing rather than the entire database.

*Edit 04-12* John & Marc both pointed out that filters would be the best way to view the subset - correct - I forgot about the filters that will further reduce the results you are currently viewing.

There are also some add’l Special Items such as the Image Well, Uncategorized and Tagged images.. I think these are all self explanatory.

One really powerful and nicely implemented feature in Pro 2 is the Batch Information routine (Ctrl-M). The Batch Info function is used to copy data back and forth between the catalog and the IPTC/XMP data within the photos. This is how one would ensure all their catalog data is embedded back into each photo (or in sidecar files for RAW or non-image files). Here is a preview of the Batch Info screen:

Ok.. this screen has 4 tabs with a bunch of fields that will determine how and where data from both the catalog and from the IPTC/EXIF data is written to both the Pro 2 database and into the files - here’s how this works. On the first tab, you will see the fields that exist in the Pro 2 Database. They are: Caption, Date/time, Author, Rating, Notes, Keywords and Categories… these are the fields displayed on the property tab in the Organize/Properties pane. You are able to define what should be placed into these fields in the Set Batch Info dialog. You can enter a free text value, pull info from the database itself, or pull entries that exist in the Image’s EXIF, IPTC and XMP data fields. This is an extremely powerful way to keep your database in sync with your images and define custom templates to perform certain steps.

Let’s take our cat photo as an example. Let’s say that I just found the cat photo on my PC and want to load all the metadata into my database (the image was keyworded and metadata was added in another program). When I first view the photo properties in Pro 2, the image looks like this:

Notice, that I don’t have any keywords, rating, caption or rating listed in the catalog. Also, notice that I do not have any categories defined for this photo (none are checked off). So, I entered the Batch Set Info screen and set the field options as follows:

This screen defines exactly what values will be populated into the database. I set this up as:

Database Field	Where is the value coming from?
Caption	IPTC Caption
Author	IPTC Photographer
Rating	IPTC Urgency
Notes	IPTC Special Instructions
Keywords	IPTC Keywords
Categories	IPTC Supplemental Categories

In addition, this powerful routine allows you to set data INTO the IPTC data in the file and choose where to pull the data from as shown in this screen:

This shows that we will also be updating the IPTC keywords from the Catalog Keywords, and the IPTC Supplemental Catgories from the Catalog Categories. Note that these options will not overwrite data that exists in the catalog or the image unless you specifically state so. This will allow you to control which is the dominant place for data but still allow you keep to things in sync if the data does not exists or is different.

After running the Batch Set Info on this image with the settings above, the following is seen in the Properties tab:

So, you can see that the database has been updated with the fields from the IPTC data as defined in the batch set information screen…. An amazingly powerful tool that makes keeping info up-to-date and in sync quite easy.

Some things to note.. there does seem to be a bug in the program where after you run the Batch Set Info tool and update the Database Categories, the newly set categories are displayed and defined, but they are not checked off. You must exit the Database pane and then re-enter it to see the check marks. Also, there is no tool to automatically show or tell you which files are not in sync.. ie: you’ve made changes to the database but they are not in the IPTC data within the file. This is a feature that I also really hope is in a future release… as a product targeted to pros, it is really important to be able to manage this without having to run Batch Set Info on the entire database all the time just to be sure…

There are lots of other metadata related features that are nice including:

• the ability to define specific Database and IPTC elements to display in a Custom tab (choose those that are important to you)
• icons that display above each thumbnail to indicate if catalog data has been entered (user controlled)

Some things I’d like to see added:

• as mentioned, the ability to show an icon if metadata is out of sync between the Catalog and the Image
• auto-update the IPTC data if it is changed outside the program and Pro 2 is running
• ability to script off of the metadata in the program
• rollover “balloon” in the thumbnail to display user defined info (like keywords) if you highlight the “catalog info exists” icon. You can turn on a rollover balloon to see a photo preview and some metadata.. but you cannot control what info is displayed. I’d like to just have an icon that signifies there are keywords and when you rollover the icon, it just shows you them.

All in all though… I must admit, Pro 2 is very easy to use to document and keywords your images!

RAW Editor

Let’s take a quick look at the other main feature of Pro 2 that sets it apart from other DAM programs - it’s full featured RAW editor. While I won’t spend too much time with this since you’d need to spend much longer than I have with the program to fully understand the complexities of the program, I will touch upon it and demo how quickly and easily you can update and convert your images using Pro 2.

Using the Pro 2 RAW editor is as easy as selecting the RAW Processing (or Batch Raw Processing) command from the main GUI as shown here:

You are then taken to the RAW Editor and the image is loaded and displayed along with the RAW tools.. this process did take a little longer than I would have liked for each .NEF image… but then again, I’m not using a Duel/Quad Core system for testing so results should be faster with a more modern PC. In any event, the following shows the RAW editing screen:

Ok.. so as we can see here, there are a number of tools available to modify the image… the standard fare: exposure, highlight recovery, fill light, contrast, etc.. and some new stuff unique to Pro 2… Light EQ and easy access to Luminance channel modifications. After tinkering with the values, I was able to achieve the following edits to the .NEF:

Quite a powerful tool… I was able to bring down the overexposed areas and control teh color a bit more.. Some things to note: batch processing the RAW files only allows you to copy and paste RAW settings from a single file to a single file… there is no ability to sync or auto-apply settings you make on one file to all the others in batch mode. Again, I’m hopeful this will change in the next version. Also, as noted, it takes a good amount of time on my PC to process the RAW files - not out of line but not as “snappy” as RAW Shooter or - dare I say it - Lightroom.

Another gotcha with Pro 2 is how it handles .DNG files… DNG files allow you to update the embedded preview image as you work on it in a RAW editor like Lightroom. In Pro 2, it will display accurately as a thumbnail and preview so any edits you make to the RAW file will be viewable in the Pro 2 database (might require a refresh of the thumbs). This is very nice and one reason to stick with DNG instead of Canon or Nikon RAW files which do not accommodate this feature. The problem is when you go to edit the DNG… of course, since you did not edit the RAW file in Pro 2, it cannot use the RAW settings embedded in the file and you basically get the original DNG image to work with. This might cause some confusion since you are not starting with the image as shown in the thumbnail or preview. Makes sense when you think about it.. but can be confusing and is something to note…

In conclusion, I find the RAW editor in Pro 2 a nice addition and really a viable option for editing your RAW files.

Search Capabilities

Searching is an important part of any DAM application as you will need a good way to find all those images you are cataloging. Pro 2 has a number of way to search for your images - let’s start with the Quick Search:

In the example above, I used the Quick Search to find any photo that had “trees” listed in the: Notes, Author, Caption, Keywords, Caption, Photographer, Headline, and Special Instructions in the Catalog AND in the IPTC fields. Note: The quick search only finds entries that EXACTLY MATCH what you type in… I’m not sure why they did this.. but be careful because no partial entries or wildcards are allowed. You are allowed to enter some basic ‘and/or/not’ operators to search for things like Red + Apple.

I must admit… the Quick Search is FAST! Blazing Fast! So fast, you’ll want to use it all the time even with it’s shortcomings….

However, for real power searching, you’ll want to use the Search Pane. The Search Pane can be activated by using Ctrl-Shift-3 or from the menu, View-> Search. When you open the Search Pane, you’ll see the following:

The search pane allows you to search on a number of things including:

• searching for specific filenames (*.nef)
• text searches within IPTC data (such as captions) (”Holiday in Cannes”)
• you can restrict your searches to a specific folder or category (or group of categories) or search the entire database
• Catalog, IPTC, EXIF and/or XMP properties (the real power of the search engine)

I’ll skip the obvious and jump right to the Properties search. As you might ebxpect, the properties search will allow you perform searches on specific Catalog fields such as Keywords or Caption. Once you “Add” a particular field, the display changes and shows you some options (these options change depending on the type of property chosen):

As you can see, I added a search on the Caption property and now am able to change the “is” and have to “set” a value to search for. If you click on the “is” variable, you will get a drop down that allows you to choose: is, is not, contains, is any of and starts with. This allows you to search in a number of ways to include/exclude and allows for partial word searching. If I click the “Click to set” variable, the words change to a text box and I can enter what I want to search for. In my example, I set up a search on Caption and Author as follows:

After hitting Start, I received the following results in my Test Database. So, by searching on: Caption contains Cat AND Author is andy, I received a hit on the Contemplative Cat photo. Some things to note here:

• The search allows for partial entries (ie: Cat in caption)
• The search allows for multiple criteria (ie: both caption and author is searched)
• The properties allow you to search through IPTC, EXIF and Catalog fields for this info.

Ok… now for my gripes with this function as I feel the search pane is one area of Pro 2 that needs some improvement and tweaking:

• You are unable to save searches for future use (!) I created some complex searches to test out the function and it worked great.. but then I realized I couldn’t save the criteria for using in the future… this is a big hole in the product.
• There is a bug where sometimes if you have a property defined and go to edit it (ie: change ‘cat’ to ‘dog’), the edit box will automatically close on you.
• There is also a strange bug that I ran into and also found mention of in the Pro 2 forums… if you do a search on the entire database, it is pretty quick - especially in my TEST database. However, when I changed the search to only do a selected directory (one that contained the photo in fact), it was slow.. very very slow.. the search took 30 seconds as compared to 1 second across the entire database!
• Since you cannot save a search, you also cannot setup auto-updating searches that respond to changes in the database…

In summary, you can perform some very nice searches and most of the time, they are very quick… but the inability to save your search criteria is a huge feature hole - one that should be filled quickly in a Pro level product.

Scripting/Batch Functionality

Pro 2 does have a number of batch functions that are quite good. I’ll start with the one that has most of the functions added in: the Batch Processor. Here is what it looks like with a photo chosen:

So, the Batch Processor allows you to 13 functions on each selected image AND allows you to save the functions as a preset (thank you!). This is quite a powerful feature and can be used in a number of ways. For example, I used it to process some photos to post to my family blog page. I resized the images, applied some noise removal, sharpening and a watermark. The final images were then saved to subfolder.

Once you are done choosing all your options on the first screen, hitting Next takes you to the destination and renaming screen:

On this screen, you define the destination folder for the new images (if you don’t want to overwrite the originals), the file format to save the images as and some other options like preserving metadata and color profiles. Clicking next starts the processing (I wish they had changed Next to Begin so you know you are actually going to begin) and then a summary will be provided once the processing is done. You also have the option to view the new files and a final chance to save the preset. All-in-all a very nice tool.

Unfortunately, Pro 2 does not provide any scripting ability in the program. I wish this was included as it is a really nice option in some of the other DAM products and allows the community to share scripts to accomplish things not allowed standardly in the software.

The Kitchen Sink

And then.. there’s the rest of the software. There are many other functions that I haven’t touched upon (or used to be honest) that are included in Pro 2 and many of them look very nice!

• The Slide Show creates….. a slideshow! But, it allows you to create the slideshow as: a standalone .exe, a windows slideshow .scr and (the nice one) as a flash slideshow (.swf). Lots of options including transitions and how long each slide should remain on the screen is included.
• The PDF creates….. a PDF file! [ok.. I’m getting a bit tired now..:) ]
• ACDSee Showroom creates a desktop slideshow “widget” if you installed this option that shows a small frame with your selected photos. The photos rotate and fade in and out.
• You can Burn a CD or a DVD as well as creating a Video with your images in .avi, .wmv, .mpg or .mov via a wizard.. a nice option!
• the HTML Album and contact sheet creator has a lot of options as well…

In conclusion, the additional tools that are included are quite nice and really round out the software. I not sure they are really geared towards pro photographers and might be leftovers from the last version but are nice to play with in any event.

Another area I haven’t touched upon is the standard photo editor included in Pro 2. It actually is very powerful and nicely laid out and implemented in the software. I’ll always use Photoshop to do my edits - but for the quick touchup, the tools are actually very nice. Here is what the editor looks like:

The editor contains the standard array of editing tools such as exposure, red eye, watermarking, noise, etc. The tools all have many options and worked quickly on the sample .jpg I played around with.

*Edit: 04-12* Note: In reviewing some feedback here and on the Pro 2 forum board, I was asked to check out the Shadows and Highlight tool in some more detail. Users said the tool did a very nice job on under/over exposed photos, adding “pop” to a photo and was a strong tool in the Pro 2 editor. So, I took a peek… and have to agree. It really did a nice job with my sample file. Take a look for yourself in the following comparison (the new image is on the left).. Not bad! I was able to add blacker blacks and some pop to the flower without taking it too far. With 9 levels of control, it really allows for some fine tuning:

So, I do tend to agree that the editor is really full featured and a wonderful bonus to a DAM - it will do the job very nicely.

Also, you have the Calendar Pane.. it provides a quick and easy way to find photos if you know the date (or an approximate date) for the photo. You have a number of view choices:

This view shows the main calender in Photo Calendar View.. as you move your mouse over a particular date in the calendar, you’ll see some thumbnails of images from that date (please ignore the fact that I’ve copied the file 4 times on my Hard Drive!). You can choose which date from the image will appear in the calendar - you choices are:

Here are some of the other views you can see - Day view, Month View, Year View and Event View:

If you know the approximate date of a particular event or photo you are looking for, the calendar feature can be quite handy. I do like how it show a sample list of photos when you rollover a date. I also like the way it tells you how many photos exist for a given month, day or event - its a nice quick way to see how many photos you have taken each month for example

Conclusion:

In general, I am very, very impressed with Pro 2. The ACDSee team has done a good job of providing Pro users with a fast, clean and robust product that allows you to organize your photos quickly and accurately. I think there are still a number of areas that need to be tweaked or enhanced in order to really serve the amateur and professional photographer.

The search engine has a few bugs that really hinder it’s use and the lack of save-able searches in a big minus. On the other hand, a quick search is very fast and does search the typically important fields so finding your files by keyword is easy.

The fact that you don’t need to Import photos into the database is a mixed bag… since every item you hit upon is added to the catalog by simply browsing the folder pane, you will no doubt wind up adding things to the catalog that you may not want to (ie: .mp3 files, .jpgs you don’t want in there, etc). On the other hand, not having to go through an elaborate import to add to the catalog is really nice… just browse and it is added.

That lack of versioning in DAM products continues to amaze me. I’m big on versioning and think it should be a key feature of every DAM. Only one product currently has a real versioning function (Idimager) and it really helps it stand apart from other products. (I’ll discuss versioning and what I’d like to see in a post in the near future).

The build-in Editor also helps Pro 2 distinguish itself - the RAW editor is actually quite good and while the controls might not be as sophisticated as say Lightroom, the fact that you are basically getting it for free certainly helps. I hope more emphasis will be placed on the batch ability within the editor - multi-photo edit syncing will cut down on edit time and allow users to copy/paste across an entire photo group instead of doing individual changes.

So… all in all, I really like what ACDSee has done with Pro 2. I really hope the development team realizes the product they have and are motivated to take it to the next level with Pro 3 (or may I hope for a Pro 2.5?)… I believe Pro 2 is a really strong product that gives the other major DAM applications a run for the money.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the product (and on my review of it).. so please post comments and as always, let me know what you think of the site.

Pros

Speed: Pro 2 is fast. Thumbnails are created quickly and the Quick Search allows you to find you images quickly..

GUI: Nicely done. The GUI is flexible allowing you to rearrange the panes however you’d like and creating custom workspaces to switch to for your desired workflow step.

Metadata: Another nice job. Catalog info and IPTC data are all displayed on a dedicated pan and allow you to easily view and edit individual photos or in a batch method. The sync process is also very clean and quick - the ability to save profiles is a big plus.

Search: Quick Search is fast

RAW Editor: A real bonus to the product and one that works fairly well. By using the RAW Editor in the product, your thumbs and images are displayed with those edits for completely accurate viewing.

Cons

Bugs: Like any product, there are bugs but unfortunately a few of them are kinda “in the way” when working with the product. Here are some big ones I found: Saved workspaces do not remember the size of the thumbnails that were set when workspace was saved When you use the Batch Info Tool and assign categories from the IPTC data, the organize pane does not check off those categories until it is refreshed. Properties window in the Search function disappears when you try to change a value. Searching a single folder take a very long time while searching the entire database is fast.

Thumbnail Icons: Pro 2 would benefit from some add’l icons that tell you things like you need to sync the metadata.

Search Function is really weak. The inability to save searches is a big minus.

No Versioning

No Scripting Ability