Originally Posted by AndyB 
I use Google Picasa 3 mainly to just view and locate the images on my drive. I like the ability to view everything on my drive without having to go and select a particular folder to see what's in it and Picasa excels at that. That's about the only thing I like it for though.
I'm with you there. Picasa does this one thing well, but I really disliked using it for anything else. ACDSee doesn't really have anything *quite* like the initial Picasa scan (but see below). If you've got a bunch of images scattered all over the place and you need help finding them, I'd suggest using Picasa for that if necessary, get them organized into a logical structure so you don't *need* Picasa to find your lost images for you, then switch to using ACDSee from then on.
Actually, once I got things organized, it pretty much ceased to matter *where* things are - I search for images using keywords, categories, ratings, EXIF data, the date shot, etc - but almost never file location. That's become about as irrelevant as having to know what sector and track number of the physical disk the file is stored in.
However, there *are* ways to use ACDSee to help you find your find you images in the first place, sort of like Picasa's initial scan. Run "Catalog Images" on the top level folder containing your images, and ACDSee will generate thumbs and read in EXIF and IPTC info from your existing files. Then you use the Calendar view to find your files regardless of where they live. That's actually what I did. I clicked on a month in the calendar to find images shot that month, weeded out duplicates or images that just didn't belong, added keywords and ratings as appropriate, then moved them all to folders organized by date. I started with my earliest images and worked my way to the present. Once done I had an extraordinarily well-organized collection, and the idea of needing Picasa to help me find images now seems as strange a concept as needing to read the instruction manual on how to turn the steering wheel of my car.
the only thing I could find which is kind of clunky to me is to go to the folder panel and expand the subfolders there. I just want to be able to see the files in the folders within folders within folders.
In the early stages of organization, that can indeed be a common operation. Once a collection is well-organized, using the Folder panel becomes an increasingly rare thing to want to do. But there are a couple of shortcuts that can help while still in those early stages. Hitting the "*" on the numeric keypad (has to be the numeric keypad - might require a "helper" key on a laptop that lacks a dedicated numeric keypad) will expand the selected folder one level. Hitting it again expands *all* of its subfolders one level. Hitting it again expands *all* of those 'grandchildren. So usually just a few presses of "*" will completely expand any tree. Then you can shift-click the last elements to select everything in the tree.
Again, once things are cataloged and organized, one virtually *never* should need to do this - whatever those images have in common can be accessed more directly using the calendar, categories, keywords, ratings, etc.