Alright, I'm trying out ACDSee. I'm determined to find my zen solution for organizing scrap supplies. (If you are curious, I love Lightroom for photos, but I hate having 2 catalogs, and I hate having supplies and photos together). So, here's my question: I have an external hard drive that I don't keep connected always. Can I make ACDSee see the previews, even if the EHD is currently disconnected? I know I can't access the files, but I want to be able to see that they exist, like I can in Lightroom.
I've never used ACDSee. I use LR for photos and Bridge for scrap stuff. Although it would not give you previews if the external is disconnected.
That's what my experience has been. It's one of the reasons I wanted to try ACDSee - to see if it would hold the connection.
ACDSee does show them. I recently changed an old drive for another and had to move my products over. It still showed the previews on the disconnected old drive, but I couldn't access them of course. (It turned out to be a bad move to disconnect the drive and not remove it from the database (but that is another topic).
I started using acdsee this year and prefer it over bridge. I do a bit of tagging and find it loads faster than bridge. Hope you like it, I do.
Is it a setting? Or a way I need to add to the catalog? I'm thinking I missed a step in adding my supplies, and that's my problem. I have a habit of just playing and seeing what works. I can see my files, and figured out tagging and categories, and how to write the tags to my files. Am I supposed to be importing or something?
When you have the drive connected the files will only automatically be added to the database when you go through every folder and ACDSee "looks" at every file. As this is too tiresome you can add them to the catalogue manually. That would be under Extras -> database -> catalogue files (or something like that, I am translating this). Once the files are catalogued they should show even when the drive is disconnected. HTH
Yes, ACDSee will still show previews from an unconnected EHD. If the supplies were already on the EHD and it was not connected when you loaded ACDSee on you will probably need to import them. The important thing to remember is not to move files around from outside ACDSee as it won't know where to look for them.
Ditto to above. My ACDSee catalog needs to be updated, but I tag products with keywords when I buy them, and I have a great (for me) file-naming system, so I can pretty much find everything. I do want to get back to using it, though.