About the ACDSee User Interface

The ACDSee user interface provides easy access to the various tools and features you can use to browse, view, edit, and manage your photos and media files. ACDSee consists of six modes: Manage mode, Photos mode, View mode, Develop mode, Edit mode, and Dashboard mode.

Manage Mode

Manage mode is the main browsing and managing component of the user interface, and is what you see when you start ACDSee using the shortcut icon on your desktop. In Manage mode, you can find, move, preview, and sort your files, and access organization and sharing tools.

Manage mode consists of 15 panes, most of which can be closed when not in use. The File List pane is always visible, and displays the contents of the current folder, the results of your latest search, or the files in your database that match your filtering criteria. A status bar at the bottom of the Manage mode window displays information about the currently selected file, folder, or category.

You can open and close panes, move them to different areas of your screen, and stack them on other panes or dock them to the edge of the window. Most panes also have additional options you can set to further customize their behavior and appearance.

Manage mode also features a toolbar and a set of drop-down menus. The toolbar provides buttons for your home folder, and for navigating forwards and backwards through your folders. The drop-down menus provide quick access to the most common tasks.

Photos Mode

Photos mode can be used to view your entire image collection by date. You can view them by year, month, or day. If you have Microsoft OneDrive™ you can toggle viewing your OneDrive image collection along with the image collection on your hard drive, or just your hard drive collection on its own. Photos mode only displays images that have been cataloged. Images in Photos mode are displayed by the date they were taken, as indicated in the images' EXIF data.

Photos mode consists of two panes, the Date pane and Timeline pane. The Date pane displays all of your cataloged photo collection by date. The Timeline pane displays the year and month of your photos and how many photos are in each. You can also select individual images to launch them in other modes.

View Mode

In View mode you can play media files and display images and documents in full resolution, one at a time. You can also open panes to view image properties, display areas of an image at varying magnifications, or examine detailed color information.

You can open View mode by selecting an image or document and clicking on the View mode tab, and you can use the Filmstrip in View mode to flip quickly between all of the files in a folder. View mode contains a toolbar with shortcuts to commonly-used commands, and a status bar at the bottom of the window, which displays information about the current image or media file.

Develop Mode

Perform most of your non-destructive image adjustment in Develop mode. Then take your image into Edit to fine-tune. Use Develop mode's non-destructive editing tools to adjust an image's exposure, white balance, color profile, as well as sharpen, reduce noise, and much more.

Develop mode is a non-destructive, parametric editing, RAW conversion environment. Parametric editing means that when you edit an image in Develop mode you are creating instructions for adjustments, rather than adjusting the actual pixels as you do in Edit mode. Develop mode's non-destructive operations are entirely interwoven and interdependent and are applied in a fixed order to maximize the image quality. When working on RAW files, adjustments are applied as much as possible using the RAW image data.

Edit Mode

After non-destructively adjusting the image in Develop mode, use Edit mode to fine-tune your image with a greater array of pixel-based editing tools, such as red eye removal.

Edit mode works on the image data already rendered to RGB. Edits are independently applied to the converted RGB data in the order that you do them. This chain editing gives you full control over the pixels, allowing creative freedom to apply precise adjustments. This makes operations such as selections and blend modes possible.

Dashboard Mode

Dashboard mode allows you to quickly access and browse file, camera, and database statistics based on your ACDSee database and EXIF information. As Dashboard mode relies on information derived from your database, it is important to catalog in order to get the most out of it.