When comparing ACDSee vs Darktable, the Slant community recommends Darktable for most people. In the question“What is the best photo editing software?” Darktable is ranked 6th while ACDSee is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Darktable is:
There are a lot of different modules.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Dark style theme
ACDSee has a nice dark style theme.
Pro Very fast image reader
ACDSee reads the images (jpgs) extremely fast. It displays them very fast, too.
Pro Feature rich
There are a lot of different modules.
Pro Fast and Flexible
A very well considered UI makes edits fast and fluid. You can redo or undo any step without disturbing any other part of your edit. The UI doesn't get in the way.
Pro Good batch editing capabilities
Darktable allows applying the same set of operations to multiple images and saving your history stack as a style (you can pick exactly which modules).
Pro Edits are saved to a separate file
Original files are untouched by any edits. No worries on what was done before or if an accidental save occurs. All work is separate from the originals.
Pro Customizable
Darktable allows favoriting modules and remapping hotkeys.
Pro Allows for local adjustments
Most modules, by default, affect the whole image, but have the option to only be applied to masked-off areas (be those drawn masks, parametric ones, or a combination of the two).
Pro Supports tethered capture
On the camera set it to use USB Remote. Open Darktable, on the left side under Import, click scan for devices. The camera should appear. Click on tethered shoot. Next on the right side look for the gear icon above the battery n/a and click it. go to the session options tab, and change the base directory to the location you want to save photos. close that settings window and try taking a picture. It should come right up.
Cons
Con No face recognition
ACDSee doesn't allow you to set face recognition to files. It also doesn't read already recognized faces. Metadata for faces aren't shown.
Con Can be overwhelming
There are a lot of different modules. You're going to need some time watching tutorials to understand how to get the best out of it.
Con For tethered capture on Linux you may need additional software installed that is not a dependency for Darktable
First make sure you have gphoto2 and libgphoto2.
Con No official Windows version
Whilst official builds exist for Linux and OSX, this isn't the case for Windows (though unofficial versions do exist).