There are also a lot of scrap booking forums that discuss performance. However all of these sites also have tips to improve performance.

My copy “boots up” rather slow but so do all of my Adobe products. The performance seems ok once the program is running. I have about 6,000 photos in my catalog on a fairly new and powerful AMD 64 machine. I had read that Photshop Elements have been used on catalogs with up to 40,000 photos.

I first used ACDsee about 10 years ago and I did look at the site for ACDsee to see what they have been up to for the past 10 years. There was something I didn’t like but I can’t remember what it is. ACDSee is only $39 but I bought Elements for ~$45 on Ebay.

Thanks for the info and I encourage others looking for software to download the trial of ACDsee to see if you like it. Thumbs Plus is another software package that may be worth lookig at. I stil use version 4.5 and the latest version may be suited for what you need to do

For me key features are:
Writing tags to IPTC header and file mangement that allows me to move files on the hard drive into folders that would make it easy to find photos even without software.

We have many digital scrapbookers leaving PSE’s organizer & switching to ACDSee Photo Manager 9 because of that. It’s so prevalent that I have put instructions on our forum for them on how to remove PSE’s Organizer’s database to speed up performance of the PSE.

We have tutorials on ACDSee 9 at our site & info on organizing photos here if you want to consider this?
http://www.digiscrapinfo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=98