Up until recently, I was using an ancient copy of ACDSee I’d obtained from a magazine cover CD for browsing images on my computer. For years, ACDSee was one of the best image browsers available mainly due to the blazing speed at which it opened images for viewing. The secret was to pre-fetch the next image whilst you were looking at the current one; simple, but extremely effective.

Over the years, I’d tried various upgraded versions of ACDSee, but none ever really matched the performance of the version I already had. This was in no doubt due to ACDSee becoming bloated as more and more, some would say unnecessary, features were built into it.

Whilst this meant that my primary image browser lacked modern features such as RAW support, it didn’t really matter much to me since being able to view a large number of images very quickly was much more important especially since I wasn’t shooting in RAW.

Fast forward to almost the present day and I’m shooting almost exclusively in RAW when using my EOS 40D and having to import my photo’s into Lightroom before I’m able to view them.

Not any more…

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