How to Disable the File Properties Window in ACDSee

A bug afflicts earlier versions of ACDSee, although I went for years without its cropping up on my install. About a year ago, something went amiss with the configuration of the full screen view. When clicking on a thumbnail to view the full image, a File Properties window pops up for no apparent reason. File properties informs me of the EXIF data and other minor details while obscuring a large portion of the screen. I am very pleased that ACDSee knows these things, but I don't want to see them with every single image! This annoying behavior persists every time the application is loaded, and there is no obvious way to stop it in the Options menu.

After much searching, I finally found a solution here, which is to press Alt-Enter while in view mode. The File Properties goes away and stays away forever. This is far from intuitive, but is the only known method that really works. I went so far as to install Irfanview in order to replace ACDSee before I found the solution. I learned enough to write a capsule review about Irfanview, though not a favorable one.

I was unimpressed with Irfanview, which demands that the user learn a new method of navigation much different from the Windows standard. Common tasks such as selecting, copying, and pasting files do not work in the expected manner. At one point, a single file was highlighted. I pressed the delete key, expecting that file to be deleted. Instead, Irfanview deleted the entire subdirectory containing the file. Another unnecessary annoyance is that Irfanview begins with a dark screen, rather than displaying all the thumbnails in the default directory, which would seem the obvious thing to do. Irfanview does not offer any navigation to change the sorting order, an option I grew accustomed to in ACDSee. Instead, Irfanview alphabetizes. What about sorting by modified-date, file-size, width, height, and so on? These options are not on the screen where they belong. I consider these options to be essential, so I uninstalled Irfanview. My last experiment with it a few years ago went the same way. ACDSee is expensive, but even the older versions seem superior to its competitors.

I blog about issues like this as a way to save the information for future reference for myself. If other people find these notes helpful, so much the better.