Yes! I finally got myself upgraded to Photo Manager 12. This was released by ACDSee on April 22, but you know me, I have to be “fashionably late.” I had some computer issues on Thursday that involved some loud clunking noises, so I decided to bite the bullet and sign up for Carbonite. I wanted to get my computer all back-up before I installed my new software.
Yesterday I installed PM 12, and today I get to play. So far I am think I am going to really like the “social media” features such as uploading photos to Facebook, FTP capabilities and sharing photos on ACDSeeOnline.com.
I am going to post some of my “first impressions” here today. As I get to know the new features better, I’ll be updating my blog frequently. Heidi, at Digiscrapinfo.com has also blogged about this new version here: ACDSee 12 is available. There are tutorials to help you get started on the ACDSee Blog as well.
Right off the bat, I can see I am going to like the “Filmstrip View” of thumbnails when in View Mode. I took some photos yesterday (I’ll be blogging about this experience separately LOL) and as I scrolled through them in View Mose, there is a filmstrip of the rest of the photos in this folder. This makes it very easy to see which images are worth keeping, which are blurry, which ones can be tagged as “keepers” and so on.
If you don’t wish to use the filmstrip, there is a small arrow on the bottom right hand part of the screen. When you click that arrow, it collapses the filmstrip view. If you want the film strip back, click the “up” arrow on the bottom of the screen.
You also can see a small white check box on the bottom right. This is so that you can tag and find your favorite photos in a group. In this set of photos I took yesterday, most of them didn’t come out good. As I scroll through the pictures, if I see one that I like, I can check off that box. Then, back in Manage Mode, I can find all of my Tagged photos by selecting the Tagged Box, under Special Items.
TIP:If you are not sure which Mode you are in, look at the top right corner of your screen. There are four boxes: Manage, View, Edit and Online. The highlighted box is the Mode you are working in. You can click on any of them to easily move from one mode to another.
A really nice improvement for Digital Scrappers is that in this version, the Image Basket is remembered. One of the nice features in previous versions of Photo Manager was to be able to drag all of the papers and elements you want to use on a layout into the image basket. But if you closed Photo Manager, your selections would be lost. That is no longer!
Heidi writes:
Image Basket is remembered!!!
In previous versions, once you closed ACDSee the images in your image basket would be wiped out. This was quite a bummer for those that would use the Image Basket to collect all thing they need to do a digital scrapbook layout. Now, whatever you have in the Image Basket is remembered upon close and when you restart they are still there! Now I just have learn to periodically clean out my image basket after I finish my layout.
Now, that is a great feature!
As I run through some of my folders and files, I can see what ACDSee means as they promote this version of the software as “even more intuitive.” Before I installed PM 12, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. It sounds great, but what did it mean for me, in a hands-on manner? I am going to have to explain it to you, my readers, as a thing you will have to try out for yourself to understand. All I can say is that this version is going to make digital photography and digital scrapbooking faster, easier and way more fun.
You can try this out for yourself, for free at ACDSee.com. If you are already an ACDSee customer, there is special pricing, just for you. If not, the price of $69.99 is a steal for what this software does. Go try it out- I think you are going to love it!
PS: Don’t forget to come back to my blog, I am going to talk more about the photos I took yesterday, why I was taking these photos and how I edited and shared them using PM 12. It will be interesting, I promise. 
