Image Editing Software

The best image viewer for Windows? There's no contest. It's ACDSee. If you're using any other viewer, you're missing out on a lot.

ACDSee is fast. When I say “fast,” I don't mean fast. I mean FAST, as in Corvette or Atlas Centaur. ACDSee is without question the fastest image viewer for Windows and probably the fastest image archive you can buy for any operating system. I've tried dozens over the last few years, and nothing comes close. ACDSee also has the best user interface of all the Windows image viewers I've tried. I look at it this way: The best interface is the one that isn't there, one that's transparent. So here's how ACDSee works:

First you install it and make sure all the file types are checked off. (If you've klutzed yourself into an installation without checking on this, run ACDSee and open the Tools menu. Choose Options and then Miscellaneous, then click Check file associations and make sure all of the little boxes have check marks.) Then whenever you want to view an image of any kind, you double click on it. That's all you do. ACDSee quickly shows the image. The ACDSee window is the size of the image plus a little bit for the window border and title bar. That's it. That's all. You don't end up with an 800-pound gorilla program to show a 16-ounce picture. You just see the image on your screen. Ah, but here's where ACDSee becomes sophisticated. Let's say you're viewing the picture. You realize there are other images in the same folder you want to look at. Just hit the Enter key and ACDSee does a back flip and turns into an image browser.

I want to explain this again, since all the ACDSee users I've ever talked to told me they didn't realize this function existed. When you're viewing an image, pressing the Enter key turns ACDSee into an image browser, with a file list on one side and big thumbnail views on the other. At any time, pressing Enter again while a file name is highlighted flips ACDSee back to its other mode and it shows the image. This flip-flop operation works so quickly that it makes all other image viewers seem stupid by comparison. Don't take my word for it. Try it out and see for yourself. I'll bet you won't ever go back to your slowpoke viewer again. But this gets better. While you're viewing a picture, you can immediately send the picture to your standard image-editing software (Paint Shop Pro, for example) by pressing a key combination. Or you can run a slide slow. (The slide show in ACDSee is the best on the planet. Because ACDSee is so fast, it never chugs and huffs and puffs when it comes across really big images.)

Ever scan a lot of pictures and end up with a whole bunch that is upside down? No problem for ACDSee. Hitting Alt-Up Arrow flips them right side-up. Or you can flip pictures left or right with Alt and the other arrow keys. This image-flipping mode is not, as you might suspect, a way for ACDSee to flip them on the screen. It turns them over on the disk, too, so they'll look right from that point on. (And that's why it won't work for images on a CD-ROM. It can't write the corrected picture back to the CD.)