ACDSee v. 1.6

From ACD Systems
ACDsee for Mac $39.95

iView MediaPro v. 1.1

From iView Multimedia
IView MediaPro $45
Upgrade from iView Multimedia $25

Review by Gary Coyne

To facilitate control of the photos, ACDSee creates a database document for every folder you go to. On a test, I opened a folder with 273 photos, and to create a thumbnail of every one took about 4'43" on my 266 MHz G3. This database shows up in the finder as 672k. However, once the database is created, one can easily and quickly reopen the folder and/or navigate around the folder as well as sort. You are limited to sorting only the Name, Date, Size and photo Type.

Among ACDSee's features is the ability to create html pages of your photos. This is done by going into the Tools menu and simply selecting "Generate html..." You then have the option of selecting how many thumbnails will show up in the Rows and the Columns, the information that will be included with the thumbnails (file name, size, etc.), the size of the final photos, and the option of what folder will receive the final data. A medium jpeg compression is done on each photo, but you have no control on exactly how much compression is done, nor do you have the ability to turn this off if you have already made carefully controlled compression in Photoshop. [I should point out that you also have no control in this compression in Photoshop's automatic Web Photo Gallery. It tends to add about 30-50% of the size of a compressed photo to your compressed photo, but that's another story.] One particularly disappointing gap in this feature is that although you can click on any given thumbnail within your browser to see the full sized picture, there is no provision to go from one photo to the next without having to go back to the original page displaying all the thumbnails.

One of the advantages to programs like iView and ACDSee is that you can easily print custom contact sheets. That is, when you bring a series of negatives to a photographer, he or she can take those negatives, lay them on some photo paper, expose them, and use these to more easily see the positive image instead of the negative image. Here, the names typically given to photos created by digital cameras are likely to be some numerical code of the date and the number of the picture taken. With a printed contact sheet, one can look at a slide show while marking the sheet as to which photos are good, bad, or indifferent. Then, later you can match up the photos by their names as they are moved into separate folders and/or the trash. (You can also delete photos from the slide view directly into the trash if so desired). Below is a screen shot of the ACDSee printing sheet. iView's is different in appearance, but essentially offers the same with the added ability to print to CD jewel boxes, Zip, boxes, and a few other selections.

If one selects "Get Info..." from the File menu, one can see an amazing amount of data about your picture, such as the camera's aperture, shutter speed, etc. Also, from here one can add comments about any given picture which can be seen in the "Details View" or the "Wide Thumbnail View." There doesn't seem to be anyway to add these comments to either the slide shows or prints of the photos.

There are a few quirks to ACDSee, one of which is how to rotate a photo to an upright position. If you have rotated your camera so that instead of taking a standard landscape view, you take a portrait view, it will show up in the slide sorter view as rotated off 90° CW or CCW. If you double-click one of these photos, you can go to the Image menu and select Image -> Rotate 90°CW (or CCW). But, if you set the photos to run in slide-show mode, the photo will still be sideways. If you want to rotate a view in the slide sorter itself (and have it stay that way), you have to use a different rotate command found at Edit -> Batch -> Rotate. Here, you will be provided with a new window that allows you to rotate one or more images in the slide sorter. I'm not sure why they felt the need to be this obtuse about such a commonly needed feature, but at least you know where to look. Otherwise, as you are showing slideshows, all your viewers will occasionally be rotating their heads.

iView MediaPro is a significantly beefed up version of iView Multimedia that may have been included with your camera or scanner. The upgrade is only $25 and well worth the price. The name "multimedia" is well put as this can not only display the standard image files such as jpeg, gif, Photoshop, and Quicktime, but also MP3, AIFF, Fonts, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, and many, many other media types.

As opposed to navigating your way to folders via a Finder-like mechanism, in iView, one simply drags a folder (or a single media document) to the iView application icon or even to the empty right hand side of an iView window. All the resultant thumbnails created on the right side belong to what I call the Grand Set (GS). This could be saved at any time and given a name. This Grand Set is a database of your photos (or whatever) and one can create Keywords and Comments for all the items.

You can see a larger version of any photo by clicking on the Media tab seen in the upper left hand corner in the screen shot above. From there, one can click through the various photos by clicking on the window's scroll bar. The content tab (the most left tab) shows the contents of the database collection as a List View appears in the Finder. Unfortunately, you cannot view two full size images simultaneously as you can with ACDSee.

On the left hand side of the iView window, one can see a variety of selections from a drop down menu, but I find the Media Info the most informative. There, one can find a plethora of information about any given file (shutter speed, aperture, iso speed, etc.). [ACDSee also provides all this datum, but to access it, one must bring up a window for each photo and then close that window before you can continue to any other operation--very limiting.] The drop down menu also provides access to Version Control (provides some limited ability to experiment with alterations of a picture and be able to go back to the original), Captions (short explanations about the picture or file you have selected), Annotations (allows detailed information on who took the file, where, etc.), Keywords (allows searching capabilities on large collections of files), and Categories (other levels of searching capabilities).

Entering the data in either Keywords or Categories is both creative and dreadful. The program provides a reasonable amount of keywords to begin with, and any words you type in are automatically added to this drop down list. Each file can have multiple keywords. It is also possible to Shift-click a select a group of files so the group of them can have any given Keyword. However, shift-clicking can only be for continuous files, one cannot select discontinuous items. The same goes for Captions: one can select for adding any text for an entire set or for an exclusive "selected" set. Additionally, one can transfer these comments and captions into each file so any captions placed in any given photo will be transferred to any other iView database.

One of the tremendous features of iView is that one can simply move the individual photos around in any order by mousing down on any file and drag it to where you want it to appear in the slides order. This is both logical and intuitive and completely non-existant in ACDSee.

iView, like ACDSee can create html photo pages. Despite some frustrating limitations, iView does provide for significant Apple-scripting capabilities. Thus, one can create custom layout options for how each photo set will look. iView does provide an option to adjust how much compression will be done on the photos, one still cannot have the program simply copy the photo you have and place it in a page. Also, the text that you place in the Caption and Annotation can be used on each developed html page. Unfortunately, there is inadequate information on which information will show up and where it will show up. So, be prepared to recreate you web photo pages over and over again as you fine-tune what info you want to show.

Interestingly, there is a strange quirk on how iView chooses to show a photo in its thumbnail view and what it creates with its html pages that make creating html pages with iView a disaster if you use Photoshop (or the like) on any photos. If a photo is presented landscape view, one can easily rotate it to the portrait view by clicking on the "rotate" icon and selecting how the photo is rotated. Internally, iView still has the photo in the original orientation, but it remembers you want it to be displayed in the portrait angle. When you create the web gallery, you must tell it how big you want the photos to be, say 320 x 240 pixels. iView will take that photo and present it with the proper aspect ratio but rotate it the way you want it to be seen. However, if you had taken that photo into photoshop & rotated it the right way, it will now stretch the photo that should be 240 x 320 pixels but stretch it to 320 x 240 pixels. Cropped photos of a unique aspect ratio suffer the same sad demise.
The final match-up issues:

Although I didn't like the tight Finder-dependance of ACDSee, it did have one strong advantage over iView. If you drag a photo out of the window into a different folder on your desktop, it disappears from the ACDSee window. If you drag a photo into a folder that you currently have opened in ACDSee, it will appear in the ACDSee window. This is because it uses its Finder dependence to create its databases, and as a folder in the Finder changes, ACDSee responds accordingly. iView, on the other hand, creates its own databases from whatever is in a window. So one can bring a variety of folders of photos into the same window and all the photos will show up in the same database. If you drag a photo out of the ACDSee window, that photo is still in the database and will remain in that ACDSee window. (You can Option-drag the thumbnails into a separate viewing window with iView, and these thumbnails will move from one to the other, but the original photos remain in the original folder.) The only way I could remove a photo from any Grand Set was to send it to the Trash (and that also trashes the original document). To add insult to injury, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to rescan a folder so that files that have been moved to different folders will be removed from the Grand Set. iView needs an Omit and remove option. Likewise, if you add a photo to a viewing window in iView, it will show up, but the photo remains wherever it was originally located (in the Finder). If you want it in any given folder in the Finder, you also have to drag it to the Finder folder. Simply dragging a photo to any folder in the Finder will not automatically have it show up in a viewing window.

Both programs can present slide shows, and both can vary the rate each photo is seen on screen, the screen size, etc. iView easily takes the prize for all the buttons-and-bells it has to offer on how the pictures changes and how they are displayed--and boy, can they be annoying. Remember when you first got your Mac and you sent a letter to your Aunt Maude with each word in a different font? Well, let me tell you, setting the screen dissolves to Random with 10 different choices (iris-in, iris-out, wipe-left, wipe-right, windowshade, etc.) gets real tiring real fast. It's bad in PowerPoint; it's no better here. [Strong suggestion, keep it simple--in a slide show, is your point to show off your pictures or show off how fancy you can change from one to the other?]

Due to the way that ACDSee handles photos dragged in and out of the folder being used, it is wonderful when sorting photos into sub folders. In this regard, ACDSee is much easier to work with Photoshop (or the like) as each subsequent version of each photo is automatically (dynamically) updated in the viewing window. I was unable to create a good workflow with iView and Photoshop. On the other hand, iView's ability to place the photos in any order you want by simply dragging them is WONDERFUL. This is how a slide sorter is supposed to work, and here it does.

iView creates new data as you change the size of the thumbnails from scratch from each photo and the quality of these thumbnails is superb. The thumbnail images created by ACDSee pale in comparison.

In short, these programs are very frustrating unless all you want is what they offer, neither is very compatible to a Photoshop-included workflow. iView is easy to work from the Finder but nothing beyond throwing items in the trash will change what you see in its viewer. When first exploring iView, I was wowed out by the possibilities. However, as I tried to create a workflow with it and Photoshop, I was constantly being thwarted. After initially working with iView, I was very unimpressed with ACDSee until I saw the advantages on how it provided better workflow for sorting though great piles of pictures. It would be great if ACDSee would allow users to move slides around to rearrange the sort order at will and provide an easier UI for rotating the orientation of slides. Likewise, iView really needs an "omit" and "remove" feature to let users have more control on what is seen in any collection.

Both programs have some wonderful capabilities and are a welcome upgrade to whatever you received with your camera. But, I found the best option is to have both programs. ACDSee for initial sorting of pictures, and when you are completely done, then you can bring any one folder or groups of folders into an iView database to use its better ordering capabilities. But, as it's unlikely you will want to purchase both, I leave it in your hands to figure out where in the workflow process you want to use either of these programs.