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ACDSee 4 left me with such distaste for the triumph of marketing over common sense that I removed it from my computer. I then installed the latest version of Irfan View, the champion of freeware image viewers.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

ACDSee's fall from grace: How the best image viewer became unacceptably bloated


Jan. 13, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   For years, I've praised ACDSee as the best image viewer for Windows. This $50 program displayed images quickly, provided thumbnail-sized versions of all my pictures on demand and was unmatched in the way it integrated image management into image viewing. It even had a good built-in image editor.
   But I no longer recommend the current version of ACDSee. Instead, I'm recommending Irfan View, a free program that has matured into an amazingly versatile image viewer. Irfan View has a one big drawback (explained shortly), but is competent and very easy to use. It can be downloaded from www.irfanview.com.
   ACD Systems, the company behind ACDSee, inexplicably turned a great product into a bad one by redesigning the way ACDSee looks and works. Unfortunately, anyone who wants to buy a good version of ACDSee has to choose what the company calls the "Classic" version, designed a few years ago. ACDSee Classic is better than nothing, but that's hardly a reason to choose an old program -- especially since Irfan View is such an outstanding modern alternative.
   The non-classic program, ACDSee 4, is confusing to use and full of annoying pitches for other ACD Systems products. Version 3, the last good version, is no longer available. Even if you were willing to "downgrade" your purchase of ACDSee 4 to ACDSee 3 (by paying the premium price for ACDSee 4 but asking for ACDSee 3 instead), the company won't let you do it.
   I've owned a copy of ACDSee for a long as I have been using Windows. Until the disastrous redesign, I'd been using it every day for years. It had proven itself as an exceptionally fast and accurate image viewer and an almost perfect graphical file manager, able to copy and move files or folders, not simply images, very quickly.
   And ACDSee did much more. It was a superb program for quick image cropping and basic editing, and it was able to convert any number of images from one format to another with a few mouse clicks.
   ACDSee 4 left me with such distaste for the triumph of marketing over common sense that I removed it from my computer as quickly as I could. I downloaded the latest version of Irfan View, the champion of freeware image viewers, installed it and reacquainted myself with its interface.
   In some ways, Irfan View is one of the wonders of the modern world. It can display anything that passes as an image, no matter which sister-in-law it came from and no matter how oddly it was mishandled on the way to your PC. I've been able to view images in Irfan View that even ACDSee had trouble with, and I know professionals who keep a copy of Irfan View around for those times when their $695 graphics software can't figure out what to do with an odd image.
   Irfan View also knows how to get its own windows and menus out of the way when all you want to do is view images full-screen. It has a built-in image editor, and, just as ACDSee does, it can create desktop backgrounds ("wallpaper") out of any image with the press of a key.
   It even creates wonderful thumbnails of all images it finds, just as ACDSee does. Likewise, image thumbnails are always optional; you don't need thumbnails to be able to view images.
   But Irfan View, as good as it is, has a flaw that puzzled me for days until I became convinced that the programmer did it intentionally. It doesn't save its thumbnails. Each time you open a folder full of images, it makes thumbnails all over again as if it had never seen the pictures before. I later found out that Irfan View's programmer, Irfan Skiljan, designed the software that way.
   If this doesn't bother you, you'll probably find Irfan View a godsend. But if you have a lot of images -- and I'll bet you do -- this oversight in Irfan View might prompt you to split the duties of image viewing and image thumbnailing. You could use Irfan View for quick viewing and use either ThumbsPlus or Compupic for making thumbnails. That's how I do it.
   I'll report on ThumbsPlus and Compupic next week.