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I have to say that although the new features compete reasonably head on with Lightroom, ACDSee has lost sight of its original function as an excellent graphics file management system. This is manifested also in the diappearance of the very hand M-power programme which was quite unique in allowing lots of handy right click functions from Windows explorer.
What appears to have been forgotten is that ACDSee is not just about photos! It handles all file types and thus the ACDSee categories database is massively useful, for example for magazine editing where photos and vector images might all be required. So the ACDSee database categories should ideally automatically include (as an option) IPTC keywords, but not be limited to these. So people who complain that the IPTC keywords and ACDSee keywords are not identical are coming at this from a photo storage viewpoint only.
Despite observations that the loss of symbols for the categories, and the loss of indication in "parent" categories that a file has a "child" category ticked, both of these have remained abandoned in beta 2 and it would appear in the release candidate. I think that the new "manage" window is a bit of a mess really, I preferred what happens when you toggled between edit and view mode by double clicking in version 2.5.
I also find it annoying that its really hard to edit a picture in Photoshop now; you used to be able to configure this as the default editor, now there seems no way to send to Photoshop. I know that the non-destructive and destructive distinction, and the addition of jpeg support, have been improved, but believe me, nothing beats the history brush in Photoshop for fine tuning difficult editing work.
For me this is the first time that the improvements will be outweighed by the losses. I already have Lightroom, why would I want a copy? Please strenghen, OR AT LEAST RETAIN the catalogue functionality for all graphic types, that is at the heart of ACDSee.
