Digital Home Thoughts: ACD Systems Releases ACDSee Pro 2.5

"Discover ACDSee Pro Photo Manager 2.5, the workflow platform that's custom designed for professional photographers. View, manage, edit and publish photos with the ultimate in precision and control. ACDSee Pro 2.5 comes with all the state-of-the-art tools demanded by professional photographers. Acquire images, leverage metadata, apply non-destructive and pixel-level image editing, and manage your backups seamlessly. You'll enjoy perfected shots, organized files and a workflow that's optimized for your needs."

As a free upgrade for owners of ACDSee Pro 2, you couldn't ask for much more: there's a new import wizard that adds the ability to set by categories, keywords, EXIF, IPTC, and they've also added UNICODE support for non-latin character-set languages. They've upped their support with more raw formats, and there's a four-way photo comparison tool to allow you to pick your best shot. I use ACDSee Pro as an image viewer, and use it to batch-edit metadata (correcting an irritating Lightroom 1.x bug) along with re-naming my files, re-sizing them before uploading to this site, and a whole lot more.