The newest versions of ACDSee incorporate modern Digital Asset Management tools like Face Detection & Facial Recognition (Ultimate 2019).

ACDSee's main features are speed, lossless RAW image editing, image batch processing, editing metadata (Exif and IPTC), rating, keywords, and categories, and geotagging.

The thumbnails generated by ACDSee are cached, so that they do not need to be regenerated, and stored on disk as a database.

ACDSee Pro was released on 9 January 2006 aimed at professional photographers.

The original ACDSee software was created by David Hooper, who also added a number of features to ACDSee Pro, such as Lighting correction (formerly known as Shadows and Highlights) and Develop Mode (in version 2.0).

In August 2012, ACD Systems released ACDSee Free, which retains all viewing features for the most common image formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WBMP, PCX, PIC, WMF, EMF); it lacks a thumbnail browser, and support for RAW and ICO formats.