The main differences:

Modes:

ACDSee’s user interface has been broken into modes:

ACDsee has 4 modes:  Manage, View, Edit, & Online. 

• Manage is where the organizing gets done.  As a digital scrapbooker, I spend the majority of my time still in the familiar manage mode that is similar to the previous version of ACDSee. 
• View allows you browse your images larger.  The view mode is nice also when you want to see images larger.  There are few things you can do while viewing them large and I will share that later in another post.
• Edit allows you to do editing of your images.  The edit mode allows you to make changes to your image and it will automatically save your original away for safe-keeping.  If you decide you don’t want to keep the changes, you can right click and choose Restore to Orginal
• Online allows you to upload to ACDSee Online albums.

Multi-select & boxes in the Organize Pane

In the organize pane, they have made a new way to assign images.  The boxes are now for assigning a category (not for searching for a category.)  For those familiar it takes a little bit to get used.  I kept assigning images when I started to do a search and found a few mis-categorized images.  To do a multi-select, you use the arrows on the left side. To select categories to search for, you click on the category name or on the arrows on the left.  (Hold down ctrl to select multiple ones.)    For the organizers that like to check boxes to assign categories, they will like the boxes next to the categories.  I still like the faster way of dragging and dropping the categories onto the selected images to assign. 

Tagged flag

Tagged flag allows you to mark images at “Tagged” and then quickly recall all Tagged images in bottom right.  This can be used however you want.  In another blog post, I’ll share my use of the tagged flag.

Edit Shortcut

The keyboard shortcut to send your image to a default editor has been changed!   The all familiar CTRL-E now sends you into the Edit mode in ACDSee.   The way to send your images to your default editor now is CTRL ATL X.  I find this key combo incredibly hard to do so there is way to reassign this back to CTRL-E.   More on that, in another blog post too!

Windows 7 support

It is supported on Windows 7 if you have upgraded your operating system.

Share on Facebook

You can get your photos from ACDSee to Facebook.  It is using ACDSee online mode and uploading them to your ACDSee Online Albums from there you can share them to Facebook.

FTP support

If you ftp images or files to an ftp server, you can use Send to FTP Site… 

Image Basket is remembered!!!

In previous versions, once you closed ACDSee the images in your image basket would be wiped out.   This was quite a bummer for those that would use the Image Basket to collect all thing they need to do a digital scrapbook layout.  Now, whatever you have in the Image Basket is remembered upon close and when you restart they are still there!   Now I just have learn to periodically clean out my image basket after I finish my layout.

The price:

The regular price is $69.99.  If you already own ACDSee products, the price is $48.99

Visit ACDSee to download the trial for ACDSee 12

If you visit, ACDSee and look at the tutorials for ACDSee 12, you will find these tutorials to learn more about ACDSee 12:

• ACDSee 12 for new users
• ACDSee 12 for existing users
• Moving photos to another computer
• Tagging your images
• Emailing images
• Browsing photos by date or event
• Uploading your photos to ACDSeeOnline.com

• Getting 2 different menus when you right click.
• Expanding all your folders or categories quickly
• How to get your panes in ACDSee back to “normal” again quickly
• How to refresh your file list
• How to quickly view an image full screen.

Check it out here:  Some tips you might not know when using ACDSee!

Note:  ACDSee has 2 major product lines – home & professional.  The home versions are the ones used for digital scrapbooking organizing, ACDSee 9 (old), ACDSee 10(old), ACDSee 2009(most recent).   The pro versions are ACDSee 2.0 & 2.5 (old) and this new release ACDSee Pro 3.  If you are confused about which version is the best for you, here is their quiz.

Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!

If you are person that takes a lot of photos and need to process RAW photos or like to tweak the lighting, color, etc of the images, then this product is for you.   ACDSee Pro 3 competes against Adobe Lightroom.    In ACDSee Pro 3 they introduced some new “modes.”

Manage Mode:

The Manage mode is the one where you your organizing, categorizing, and this is similar to ACDSee 2009 or ACDSee 2.5 and very little has changed here.   

View Mode:

The view mode is to look at images larger.  It basically is like Windows explore filmstrip version. 

Process Mode:

The Process mode is where the majority of new additions were added.     Think of the Process mode as the digital darkroom.  In the Process mode there are 2 sub-modes, Develop & Edit.   Develop is the non-destructive editing of the image.   The Edit is the normal destructive editing.  Whenever you Develop or Edit something, the originals are saved in a hidden folder so you can revert back to your original if you need.  (And if you show hidden folders on your windows, you will see Developed & Originals folders if you have processed an image in that folder.)  In the past, I typically took it upon myself to save the original and then do edits.  With this tool, you can forget having to save the original and let the tool do it for you. 

Process Develop mode (non-destructive editing) you have many different settings, here are the Tune, Detail & Geometry:

Process Edit mode (destructive editing) you have what appears to be some of the same as in Process and some additional editing tools.

So you have this Develop And Edit sub-modes in the Process mode and it seems just a little confusing.  When this product was in Beta there was quite a discussion on this.  So I wanted to clarify it but I think the best way is to quote a ACDSee’s developer from the beta forums:

Basically, you can think of bringing an image into develop mode as the same thing as bringing a roll of film into a photo lab. You bring your negatives into the shop and they develop them into a good looking image. Develop mode is our way of letting you control the way the lab tech develops your image. You walk out of the photo lab with the printed images (developed images), and you still have your negatives in your pocket so you can return to the lab to get them developed again using different settings if you want.

Now that you have your printed images you are free to do what you want with them. My analogy is going to break down a bit here, but let’s say you want to draw a moustache on someone’s face on your printed image. You get out your pen and draw on the image (this is like using edit mode). After drawing the moustache on the image you start thinking "I really wish this image was brighter, I’m going to go back to the photo lab to re-develop the image with some brighter settings". This is the point at which you are considering going from Edit to Develop mode. In reality, you can’t bring a printed picture with a moustache drawn on it back to the photo lab and ask them to brighten it. The only way you can re-develop the image is to bring in your negative and ask them to develop the image brighter this time. Obviously you are going to have to abandon the moustache you drew on the image and start from scratch.

Using the process tools you can tweak your images and even save some you didn’t think were all that good.  This really helps if you aren’t the best photographer.   Before & After I did some tweaking in Develop Mode.

Sharing photos:

In addition, they added a new tool to ftp your images to a site.  So this may be beneficial for some digital scrapbookers.   You can upload from ACDSee to the following sites:  Smugmug, Flickr, Zenfolio and ACDSee’s new online album.

Organizing aspect:

And I have to finish this up with Organizing aspect of ACDSee Pro 3 because so many of us use ACDSee products primarily as their image organizer for digital scrapbooking.   I know the question I will hear will be does ACDSee Pro 3 introduce any new features that will help us with organizing digital scrapbooking supplies.  Unfortunately, ACDSee Pro 3 new features focused on image editing/processing of images.  There was very little change in any organizing features.   The minor changes are in the organize pane:

Category Icons are gone

They removed the icons for the categories in the Organize pane.   This now requires me to read the categories and figure out what category I am in instead of glancing an icon.  I miss the icons.

ACDSee 2009:ACDSee 3.0:

Assigned Flags are gone as well as Multi-select boxes but you can assign a category by checking a box in Organize pane.

In previous versions there were little assigned category flags signaled that if an image or multiple images were selected which categories or you could tell which sub-categories were assigned.  (See screenshot of ACDSee 2009 to see what I am trying to explain.)   There also were little boxes that were multi-select boxes that allowed you check multiple boxes for searching on multiple things.  Both the flags UPDATE: & multi-select boxes are gone in ACDSee 3.

ACDSee 2009:  

The new boxes in ACDSee 3 now allow you to assign or un-assign categories by checking a box in the Organize pane (previously checking a box could only be done in the Properties Pane.)  

Instead of the multi-select boxes,  to select multiple categories for a search in ACDSee 3, you need to select your first category, hold down the CTRL key and select the second or more categories.  (Definitely not as intuitive as the multi-select box.)  UPDATE (or use the blue & gray pointers on the left.)

There are also new blue & gray pointers on the left.  Not sure if grey/blue pointers add much at all.  I can already tell what is selected because the whole row is in blue.   UPDATE.  The pointer are multi-select boxes that disappeared from above. They are now arrows instead of boxes.

ACDsee 3.0 

But as with all of ACDSee products, the best way to figure out if the product is right for you is to TRY it out.   All of ACDSee’s products have a free full working version for 30 days.

Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!

What could digital scrapbookers do with embedding?

• Protect and safeguard their organizing.
• Share their organizing of photos with family & friends.
• Designers could published already organized digital kits. 

• Digital Photo Naming Conventions, the why & suggestions
• Digital Photo Naming Conventions, the how

Table of contents for Organization Challenge 2009

1. Organization Challenge: Week Five
2. Organization Challenge Week Four
3. Organization Challenge Week Two
4. Organization Challenge Week Three
5. Organization Challenge: Week One
6. Organization Challenge Week Six

How has everyone been doing? Plugging along, slowly and steadily? I hope so. Just like real life messes our digital messes sometimes take a long time to create and will take a long time to clean.
I think that we have one more task that we should work on before we finish this series for now.

This is one that I started last year for the Organization Challenge, but I know that over the course of the year, I have slacked off, and did not keep up with this one as well as I should have.
When I first started tagging elements, I tagged every last one of them. If I had a ribbon pack with the same basic ribbon in 10 colors, I tagged each one as “ribbon” and by its color. In doing a category search of ribbons, all varieties of them appear. This wasn’t a big deal two years ago when I first starting using Photo Manager. I had a whole lot less stash for the program to search. But now if I did a search for “Ribbons” I have more ribbons returned that I really need to scroll through.
What I had decided to do is go back and control this excess tagging. I had worked through my categories to un-tag the individual elements and make sure that only the preview is tagged. This is similar to what we did with the tagging of alphas. This works best with “Element Kits” rather than a full kit with papers and elements. However, you can work with this however you find it to be best for you. This reduces the wait time when I search a category with a large number of items.

Go through each set of elements that have multiples colors of the same item. This folder has every belt tagged  as “Ribbon.”

I don’t think I need to have each one of these come up in a  search. The kit has a great preview and that is really the only item that I feel need to be tagged. To easily do this, Select all images. Ctrl-Click the preview to deselect it, then uncheck the rest of the elements. When I do a search and I want to use an element in that preview, all you need to do is right-click and go to File, and you will be brought to the folder that has these gorgeous belts in every color!

TIP: If the folder has a few different styles of the same thing I will tag one of each variety. This way, I will have 4 different label styles appear in a search, and all of the color variations can be found using Go To Folder.

You can find these elements by pulling up tagged categories through searching in the Organize Pane. When you find several items that are identical aside from color, click on one, right click, then Go To File. Or you can go through your Folder Tree on the left side of your screen, and browse through and see what needs to be taken care of.

Some types of categories you may with to look though may include “Frames,” “Ribbons,” “Brads,” and so on.

To recap:
Browse through your folders.
Tag preview only.
Use Go to File to find additional items.

Our Homework:
1. Back up and Optimize.
2. Go through your folders and remove “repetitive” tags.
3. 15 minutes a day to work on that stash!

All in all, I think that it is time to wrap this series up.  However, while the series might be finishes, that does not mean our time organizing is done. Just like laundry, tagging is never completely over. Keep up your “maintenance” plan, with 15 minutes a day of tagging, weekly back up and optimizing, and go through some of the other challenges as you need them. I hope that all of you were able to get some help moving in the right direction from these challenges.
Have fun and happy tagging!

Table of contents for Organization Challenge 2009

1. Organization Challenge: Week Five
2. Organization Challenge Week Four
3. Organization Challenge Week Two
4. Organization Challenge Week Three
5. Organization Challenge: Week One
6. Organization Challenge Week Six

How are your digi-files coming along? I hope that you are finding these suggestions and steps to become better organized helpful. I know that since I did this last year, my files have become messier- with some shoved into folders where they didn’t belong. So even though I did all of this last year, I think my hard drive deserved a good clean-out again.

1. 1. Did you Back up and Optimize? With all of the time and effort you are putting into this, you don’t want to lost any tagging so backing up and optimizing is very important. And I know I really see a difference after I optimize my database in how smoothly the program runs.

2.  Work on those fonts, I am getting there. I found fonts stored in four, yes *four* different folders, so it is going to take a while. But I found a huge amount of duplicate files. Now that they are deleted off my computer, it is saving me a lot of room! I am also purging fonts I don’t like and know I will never use.

This week we are going on to another potentially difficult and messy category: Organizing your brushes. Abr brush files can only be seen in Photo Manager 10, 2009 and Pro Versions 2 and 2.5, so if you are using an older version of Photo Manager,you won’t be able to do this challenge. Or, you can download a free 30 day trial for Photo Manager here

You’ll be totally hooked, so be warned.

This will be similar to how we organized out Fonts. However, I don’t tag my fonts, but for some reason I do tag brushes. I am not really sure why I do that. It could be that fonts can usually be put into one folder or category, but brushes, because of the way that there are usually several brushes in one file, fit into several categories. Looking more closely at what I do, I put the brush into broad folders: Collections by Designer, type of Brush (e.g. Stitches, Doodles).

From there, I will look at the brush files. To see all of the brushes in one files, double click the files, and it will open up into the Browse window. All of the individual brushes will show up on the left side. In looking at the files, I can tag the brush with multiple categories.

Tasks for this week’s challenge:
Steps:

• Create a main folder for your brushes. I keep the default Photoshop brushes in the Adobe presets folder.  All of my other brushes, I keep in my scrapbooking folder, just as I would keep my elements and papers.
• Create Sub-Folders based on the system you want to use. You can either use Move To Folder (Alt M) or drag your brushes from the first folder to the new brushes folder.
• Create categories and sub-categories in the Properties pane.

TIP: To do this, you Right Click on Categories, type Brushes, click enter. To create sub-categories, right click on Brushes, and type in your sub-category names.

• Working through your files, tag the brushes with the sub-categories.

TIP:  As you go through tagging your brushes, add in a designer name or credits if you have them.

• If you want to make a contact sheet to see all of the individual brushes, select the files. Go to Print|Contact sheet. Adjust the thumbnail settings to fit as many thumbnails as you wish on one page.

To use brushes in Photoshop, drag the abr file onto your Photoshop workspace. Select the Brush tool, and they will load into the Brush Tool Box.

To use brushes in Photo Editor, Kristi put together an excellent series on the DigiScrapInfo Blog http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/2008/02/02/define-a-brush-in-photo-editor/

For a great video tutorial on using brushes:
http://www.digiscrapinfo.com/joomla/acdsee-photo-manager/115-acdsee-10-new-features

Have fun!