ACDSee Photo Studio Home is a Windows application for organizing, viewing and editing a personal photo library. It combines a digital asset manager with an image editor and a set of generative AI tools. The manager catalogs pictures and videos where they already sit on disk. It is commercial software sold by ACD Systems, with a free trial available.
Working with folders already on disk
Photo Studio Home does not require a separate import step. It browses the drive directly and adds folders to its catalog database as you browse them in Manage mode.
Folders open in browser-style tabs that remain available between sessions. Media mode narrows the view to only the folders that have been cataloged and browsed. Up to five named image baskets collect files from different locations so you can handle them together without moving them.
You can keep several separate databases and switch between them. Dropbox and OneDrive folders are also reachable. OneDrive files can stay online-only, or you can download them individually or by folder. You can keep or release local copies.
Ratings, keywords and categories
Each file can carry a rating, a tag, categories, keywords and a color label whose meaning the user defines. You can import and export keyword lists. When you add metadata from the keyboard, ACDSee Photo Studio Home moves to the next image automatically.
The Reject tag is meant for culling. During review, you mark blinks, blurred frames and other failed shots, then clear all rejects in a single pass.
ACDSee keeps its own metadata in the database. It can also synchronize keywords and categories with IPTC fields, import existing IPTC data and embed ACDSee metadata in the files themselves. You can use a map to add locations and select photos by area.
Search and filtering
Quick Search handles everyday lookups with a choice of search types. Advanced search builds AND/OR queries across ACDSee metadata, EXIF camera data and IPTC fields. You can select several entries at once in the keyword and category trees. Typing filters a long tree down to matching items.
The Home page gathers saved Quick Searches, one-click filters such as recently modified files, and shortcuts to common tasks. The duplicate finder scans across folders and lets you rename or delete each copy. Videos are searchable too, through video-specific fields in Advanced Search and through Auto Categories.
Face detection and People mode
Photo Studio Home scans photos for faces, and you only have to name a person once. From then on the program suggests matches to accept or reject in batches. In People mode, you can merge, rename or delete faces, or label faces that are still unnamed. You can bring in face data from Lightroom and Picasa, so people already identified there do not need naming again.
Batch processing and background tasks
Batch tools rename files and resize them by pixels, percentage or print size. They also crop by relative position, convert between formats and add watermarks. The Activity Manager runs several of these jobs at once in the background, alongside imports and face detection. It shows the progress of each.
Photo editing tools
The editor in ACDSee Photo Studio Home covers lighting, color, repair and finishing work:
- Lighting: Light EQ brightens dark areas and tones down bright ones independently. Exposure adjusts exposure, contrast and fill light automatically or manually. You can apply these adjustments through a brush or gradient. Levels and Auto Levels set the tonal range.
- Color: Curves work on the combined RGB or individual channels. Color EQ changes hue, saturation, contrast and brightness overall or per color. Split Tone tints shadows and highlights. Built-in and imported LUTs act as filters. Black & White sets per-color contrast in the conversion.
- Repair: Dehaze, Skin Tune, a clone brush, red-eye removal, and rotation or straightening by drawing a line along the horizon.
- Finishing: grain, text with font and opacity controls, borders, vignettes, tilt-shift focus effects and special effects such as pencil drawing and painterly looks.
Lasso, Magic Wand and rectangular or elliptical selections limit an edit to part of the picture. The Magic Wand picks pixels by brightness, color or RGB values.
Generative AI editing
AI Image Generation creates a new picture from a text prompt, a preset effect or reference images that guide character, style and composition. Generative Fill completes missing parts of a photo. Generative Edit changes an image according to a written instruction, optionally steered by reference images. AI Remove erases unwanted objects. AI Super-Resolution enlarges images while reducing noise and blur and can run as a batch job.
File formats and phone transfer
ACDSee Photo Studio Home decodes RAW files from more than 750 camera models, including GoPro RAW, and reads HEIF images from iPhones. It opens, edits and saves JPEG XL, reads and writes static AVIF, and handles transparent and animated WebP.
ACDSee Mobile Sync is a companion app for iPhone and Android. After scanning a QR code shown on the monitor, it sends photos and videos to the PC over Wi-Fi. It remembers which files have already been sent. For sharing in the other direction, SendPix sends pictures to other people and converts RAW files to JPEG on the way.
