Reading mode: Light Dark

Anything like ACDC for the Mac

Go to last post
K

khoss

Senior Member
Messages
4,946
Reaction score
206
Location
NY, US
And by "like" I mean in price and low in system resources as well. My colleague uses a Mac but she uses my computer with ACDC to review and light edit the photos on our network drives. She'll be going away for a while with a Powerbook and was wondering what is available for the Mac. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Kurt
 
Probably the closest thing at this point is Adobe LightRoom.

A little cheaper, and very capable is "Photo Mechanic" from Camerabits

--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/
 
I guess if you want an answer, you better explain what you mean by ACDC, I only know a rock-band by that name, and their songs can be played on Macs without a problem, so that's probably not what you mean. You might wanna provide a link to the SW you are talking about.
 
Well, there are basically two applications matching the requirement:

Graphic Converter http://www.lemkesoft.com/xd/public/content/index._cGlkPTE5Mw_.html

QPict
http://www.qpict.net/

The prior is more powerful, supports almost all formats imaginable and has lower resource requirements - it is also compatible with Photoshop plug-ins an has some editing features, if that is a requirement. The interface is a little aged/clunky, but you cannot beat it for the price. The latter has a much nicer, more Mac-like, interface and is better with organisation features, but lacks editing features.

An alternative might be Photoshop Elements 4.01.

Cheers,
Uwe
 
For such a quick reply. For those unfamiliar with ACDC it is, first and foremost, a rapid browser allowing navigation through you photos from any drive, allowing full screen and greater viewing and some ruimentary editing. The most used is the photo browser which works much like a lightbox. Pictures can be selected and then viewed at any size - added to an image basket and then printed, copied moved etc. OR .. opened in Photoshop or any other program that can be called from ACDC. That is the fuctionality she is looking for. Lightroom would be within price range because of the educational discount but it seemed to have the same problem of other Adobe products in the past of having to develop "albums" or other proprietary structures instead of the clean direct read of the files through a file explorer window. I could be wrong and she may demo it. Photo Mechanic and Graphic Converter looked good. I was able to download the Photo Mechanics demo but it was awfully slow and creaky. As for Graphic Convertor does anyone know if other programs can be called from it. Again, thanks for the quick replies.

Regards,
Kurt
 
khoss said:
Photo Mechanic and
Graphic Converter looked good. I was able to download the Photo
Mechanics demo but it was awfully slow and creaky. As for Graphic
Convertor does anyone know if other programs can be called from it.
Again, thanks for the quick replies.
Click to expand...
Graphic Converter has a standard "Open with..." command in the context menu; so yes, you can open the currently selected file in an external application. It also supports quite powerful batch processing features and the basic image editing functionality is quite user friendly (e.g. after changing exposure, contrast and saturation for one image, you just have to press the space bar when displaying the next image and it will apply the same adjustments). It also has the most extensive preferences I know of - you can customise the application to a very high degree.

Photo Mechanic is a nice application, but it is commonly used as the first tool in a photo workflow (ingestion, keywording, rating) and is to some degree optimised for that. It can be used as a generic browser, but it is rather expensive for using it "only" for that purpose. Other tools, such as Aperture and Lightroom are designed for RAW workflows and maintain libraries/databases - too much overhead for an image browser and also much too expensive for that particular task. iPhoto is available on all Macs and can do part of the job as well, but it has the same limitation - even if you leave media files external, you have to "import" (reference) files to actually use them. This brings a lot of overhead, generation of supplemental files, etc. Not an ideal browsing solution either.

Cheers,
Uwe
 
I'll give Graphic Convertor a try. Many thanks for the timely experience.
Regards,
Kurt
 
khoss said:
I was able to download the Photo
Mechanics demo but it was awfully slow and creaky.
Click to expand...
That doesn't sound right. Photo Mechanic is blazing fast, much faster at browsing than any of the other apps I have: Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, iView. It even runs fast on my weak old G4 Powerbook. It's used mainly at the front end - ingesting, renaming, selecting, keywording, quick-and-dirty slideshows. It's not a DAM tool or an editor, but what it does it does extremely well. Outstanding customer service and support to boot.

--
http://www.pbase.com/gzillgi
http://www.pbase.com/gzillgi/wedding_portrait

 
It isn't called "ACDC", it is ACDSee. That's probably why people can't find it.

I think you are looking for something more powerful than just an image browser. ACDSee supports some pretty advance stuff. Both Lightroom and Aperture have way more capabilities than ACDSee, but they also work just fine on file formats other than RAW. It's just that you get the maximum flexibility on RAW.

--
Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/
 
palmirone said:
...anyone know if these softwares read correctly the files NEF
modified with Nikon Capture NX? ....
Click to expand...
Photo Mechanic does. It works very well with NX. I tried the Qpict trial a while back, and I'm thinking it did recognize the NX edits, but only after restarting the application or something. You could give the trial a run and see what happens.
 
Kurt,
khoss said:
I was able to download the Photo Mechanics demo but it was awfully
slow and creaky.
Click to expand...
Hmm. That's odd. Can you tell me anything about your system, like processor type and speed, how much RAM you have and what OS you are running? Also, what kind of images were you browsing? And lastly, what version of Photo Mechanic are you using?

Photo Mechanic is usually one of the fastest if not the fastest browsers out there on both Mac OS X and Windows.

I'd be happy to try and find out how to improve your browsing experience with Photo Mechanic.

-Kirk

Kirk A. Baker
Senior Software Engineer
Camera Bits, Inc.
 
And that's another advantage of PhotoMechanic. The developer hangs out here and offers tech support.

I am not related to PM or CameraBits, but let me say this. Nearly everyone at my paper uses it for sorting and captioning and loves it (largest paper in Arizona and one of the largest in the country). It is blazing fast and rock solid.

jack
--
A few of my photos:
http://web.mac.com/kurtzjack/iWeb/ or
http://www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=4177
 
PhotMechanic is indeed in my humble amateur opinion the fastest OS X browser tagging software I've used so far (whether I use JPEG or RAW files). Plus the beautiful feature of burning the metadata into the files rather than only using sidecar files.

So trust Kirk on this one, even though he might sound biased ... ;-)

Regards

Marek

p.s. BTW I am using G5 1.6, 1GB RAM, nothing spectacular
 
I don't have a mac - I was testing the windows version for someone who does. I wouldn't know how it runs on a mac; I was testing for interface before passing it on. As it was, it was the slowest Windows image browser I've ever used. The machine in question was admittedly no speed ball, a Thinkpad with 1 GB of ram.
Regards,
Kurt
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Keyboard shortcuts

f
Forum
m
My threads
Mobile site
About
Editorial content
Cameras & Lenses
Community
All content, design, and layout are Copyright © 1998–2025 Digital Photography Review All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission.
©GPS Media - Guides, Products, Services.
Back
Top