I can see how it can be made to work, but it’s pretty limited by the standards of its rivals and compared to Lightroom or Capture One it looks from a different era. I’ve used a lot of image browsing and cataloguing tools and this is the oddest.

You might argue that at least you don’t have to import your photos… well you don’t, but instead you do have to visit a folder before Photo Studio knows it’s there. Photo Studio does keep a catalog, of sorts, built up from folders and images as you browse them, and there’s a set of tools around this including an Image Well which shows all your photos. There is a search tool, but it’s quite odd – you drag a property from a panel on the right into the search field to find images that match that property.

Categories can store images from different folders, which is useful. The Manage panel is essentially a folder browser with filters, but with the additional ability to tag images with ‘Categories’ (albums, essentially) and keywords. There is a further panel for the ACDSee 365 cloud storage sharing feature, but that’s a subscription service I’m not testing here. There are three main panels in ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8: the Manage panel, View and Develop panels. The ‘Special Items’ panel can search and filter the whole database (the Image Well shows all the images added) and the Calendar section below organizes images by date. Photo Studio for Mac 8 remembers folders or images you’ve browed in its database. How does Photo Studio 8 work? This is Photo Studio for Mac 8’s Manage panel where you browse your folders, search and organize your images. It’s a kind of do-it-all image browsing, organizing and editing tool in a similar vein to ON1 Photo Raw or perhaps even Lightroom, but as we’ll see it’s also quite different, and not in a good way. It does, however, make a Mac version of ACDSee Photo Studio, and this is the latest version. ACDSee is known for its Windows photo editing software ACDSee Photo Studio 2022, its standalone photo editor Gemstone and Luxea video editor.

Download acdsee mac