[johngs]

Has anyone used both these programs?
I'm interested in buying one of them and wondered what the main differences would be?
I prefer the price of ACDSee but what can Lightroom do that ACDSee can't?
Of course, I'll download the trials but it would be handy to hear from someone who has used both for awhile.

[Marc Sabatella]

I use ACDSee Pro regularly, but have only used Lightroom briefly - a trial version of version 1.something. I have kept up to some extent on what's going on in the LR world, if for no reason than the fact that I am a moderator on the ACDSee forums, and we get lots of discussion there about various LR features.

The programs are roughly similar in what they can do. I just liked the interface for ACDSee better - things basically seemed to be where I wanted and work the way I wanted from the firs time I opened it, whereas LR always seemed to take me longer to figure how to do anything. Someone else might easily feel the other way around.

Advantages I see to ACDSee:
- includes regular editing commands; LR does not
- doesn't require images to be "imported" into its database in order to work with them
- the Light EQ tool in RAW processing is pretty amazing

Advantages I see to LR:
- the latest versions include some non-destructive operations on selections. ACDSee does not
- LR allows non-destructive processing of JPEG; ACDSee does not
- quite a few RAW processing tools in LR that ACDSee lacks (vibrance, lens correction tools, etc)
- integrates better with Photoshop
- stacking

[bwield]

If price is an option you should look into whether of not you (or someone in your household) qualifies for the Education discount for lightroom.
instead of 299 its 99... yes thats right.. 99.

[woodworm]

I've never used ACDSee in any great extent but I have started to use LR 2 recently as a replacement for Picasa and do like it a lot but I do have one issue (for me a major issue!) in that it's a total PITA to try and synchronize multiple machines with the same catalogue. I don't know if ACDSee is as much of a problem, but one of the things I really liked about Picasa is that you can easily copy the database / ini files and all your edits, keywords, etc were available on both machines.

Apart from that I quite like LightRoom 2 and find it's performance quite acceptable.

If you use multiple PC's this may also be an issue to you.

[Marc Sabatella]

I've never used ACDSee in any great extent but I have started to use LR 2 recently as a replacement for Picasa and do like it a lot but I do have one issue (for me a major issue!) in that it's a total PITA to try and synchronize multiple machines with the same catalogue. I don't know if ACDSee is as much of a problem, but one of the things I really liked about Picasa is that you can easily copy the database / ini files and all your edits, keywords, etc were available on both machines.

ACDSee doesn't do this automatically, but as of the most recent 2.5 update that came out a few months ago, it has provided tools to make it easier - *all* database information can now be easily embedded in the images themselves (or XMP sidecars for PEF) with just a single click, and when you transfer them to another machine, it is an equally simple matter to import the embedded info from those images.

Before this, there were ways to accomplish this by exporting the db to a text file, or writing db info to IPTC fields, or, for the really adventurous, sharing copying the db itself and then fixing up discrepancies in the pathname or drive id's. I'm imagining those must be the same sort of techniques you' use with LR?

[heatherslightbox]

I've never used ACDSee in any great extent but I have started to use LR 2 recently as a replacement for Picasa and do like it a lot but I do have one issue (for me a major issue!) in that it's a total PITA to try and synchronize multiple machines with the same catalogue.

I'm in the same boat as I have LR loaded on both my desktop and laptop, the laptop being so that I can edit while I'm traveling. The way that I dealt with this was to put my catalog on a portable external USB hard drive (I have one of the Western Digital Passport ones). When I set it up this way on each computer, I pointed LR to that drive letter instead of the default C drive. If you've got all of your pics on your C drive, you'll need to move them to your external drive, but once you do that and get everything set up, it works pretty well.

HTH,
Heather