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Priced Software: ACD Systems ACDSee 7.0.62

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

ACDSee is the only package that allows you to examine your images in their original raw formats for almost all major camera brands like Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Kodak. It comes with a Device Detector, which makes acquiring media from digicams, scanners, and card readers uncomplicated. Besides this, it supports a total of 50 file formats including graphics, audio and video. Organizing and browsing through your ever-growing collection of media files got even better by its remarkable labeling and sorting options. It has an impressive Red-eye removal tool, which we found to be far more effective than in the other packages. ACDSee also allows quality printing by using its resampling filters and also supports EXIF 2.2 printing, which prints out the exact tones recorded in your camera. What you have got here is more time to be creative and less need to manage your media files. It's worth a buy for all the features it has.

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Quickly convert your files into various formats using ACDSee

iView MediaPro 2.6.3



iView MediaPro is a cross-platform (Windows and Mac) digital media management solution, which broadens its scope for being liked by enthusiasts and professionals alike. The installation requires QuickTime installed on your computer, if you do not have it installed then it will download it for you. You can select the types of files (images, audio, html etc) you want to catalog, by going to 'File > Import options'. This certainly proves helpful for people who want to catalogue only specific formats of files. Furthermore, it impressively deep scans the location (option of local disk, devices and URL available) that it is set to import files from and catalogues the finds systematically. We found the browsing mode of iView MediaPro remarkable. Clicking the 'Organize' button on the toolbar gives you two frames on the left hand side of the main window viz. 'catalogue index' and 'catalog folder'. These offered various ways of browsing a particular folder. Also, when you select a file and click on the 'Info' button, you get two frames showing you in-depth details about the file like type, size, annotation type, depth and dimensions. The image enhancement tools provided are striking as well. Besides organizing, it does various other things that other software featured here does like backing up on CD, slideshow, Web galleries and Contact sheets. 

Browsing through your collection is made

effortless by iView MediaPro's catalogue indexing

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It handles other multimedia files like audio and video with the similar superiority. 'Media management made easy' is what this software's vendor claims and the software certainly lives up to its expectations. 

Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 5



Jasc's Paintshop Photo Album is quite a valuable piece of software. We found that it has almost all the alluring capabilities that other products featured here provide. The software catalogues your pictures in its own unique way, making it possible to access the database at all times. This is on the Organize tab. Photo Shop Album's quick backing up feature, which can be accessed by clicking on the Photosafe button on the Organize tab, lets you quickly burn your collection. You can also organize your images by creating collections for added ease of finding files. Click on the Enhance tab after selecting a photo and you get to choose from options like QuickFix, Adjust Wizard, Red Eye Fix, Sepia and Text addition; all of which functions in a very efficient manner. Clicking on the Share tab will give you options to e-mail, Print, Create CD/VCD, Web gallery, Save as screen saver or wallpaper. The Create tab throws at you remarkable project options like creating an Album page, Greeting card, Book, E-card, Calendar and CD labels. The only hitch we found in this package was its clumsy and long installation process.

Paint Shop Photo Album's project wizards lets you get your job done easily

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Photodex Compupic Pro 6.2



For the price it comes for, we found the software to be very simplistic and not as resourceful as the other products in this shootout. When put to test, it more or less turned out to be just an advanced image viewer. It does not organize your media files by astutely cataloguing it all, hence making it clumsy. It uniquely marks image-containing directories and allows viewing the thumbnails of multiple folders. The search feature will be very useful only if you insert keywords. It indexes files from removable drives and maintains a separate database for the same, using which it can search for them even when the disc is not in the drive. The indexing database can get massive, but you can always disable this function. The image editing tools provided are only fairly good. 

The Web page generation feature 

Ulead Photo Explorer 8.0



We found this to be an average photo-management solution among the lot. Like Compupic Pro it too scans your computer for digital media and distinctively labels the media-containing directory. There is no cataloguing of media files as such. It supports acquiring photos, videos, and audio from a variety of digital devices, ranging a little over 30 file formats. Something that is good about this product is the variety of tools it provides for image editing, as compared with other products we tested. It offers much functionality that would prove to be handy to get your images online. Like Compupic Pro, this too can virtually catalogue file for later searching. It's fair to say it does not have any out of the world functions.

Enhance and Edit your images using variety of options

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