ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027 Keeps Most of Its AI on Your Own Machine

ACD Systems has released ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027, and the pitch is less about what the AI can do than about where it runs. Face detection, keywording, masking, super-resolution, and image similarity all process on your computer, with no images or facial data leaving it. The four new generative tools do reach for the cloud, and the company says those requests travel through servers it controls and are wiped a week later.

That split is the whole argument. "Photographers want the creative freedom generative AI offers without giving up control of their images," said Frank Lin, CTO of ACD Systems, in the announcement. "That's why every other AI feature in ACDSee Photo Studio runs locally, on-device—from face detection to image similarity." On the generative side, Lin said the software encrypts each prompt and image, sends it through infrastructure the company runs itself, and discards it a week later.

The generative tools are the headline addition. AI Image Generation builds new imagery from a text prompt, a preset visual effect, or reference images. Generative Fill extends a frame into empty space, Generative Edit takes natural-language instructions, and AI Remove erases objects. Those are the features that need a connection, and the $179.99 price includes 20,000 AI credits to run them, along with 200 GB of cloud storage free for the first year.

The organizational work is quieter and probably matters more for anyone with a large library. Auto-Stack groups photos by GPS location, capture time, visual similarity, or all three at once, with thresholds you can tune and presets you can save. Custom Stacking lets you group frames by hand, and a new Reject Tag marks images for removal during a cull. AI Reverse Image Search takes any photo and finds every visually related shot in the library, running on a new image similarity engine that indexes in the background, and an enhanced Group By clusters near-duplicates across folders or search results.

Portrait retouching gains finer control over eyes, brows, skin, shadows, and lips, along with a one-click hair edit. Elsewhere, the release updates Activity Manager, Develop presets, auto-migration, and exporting, and adds newer raw camera support. All of it sits on the cataloging, raw processing, and layer-based editing the software already had.

Ultimate 2027 ships now at $179.99 for a perpetual license, with subscription options alongside it and loyalty pricing for owners of earlier Ultimate versions. Full details are on the ACDSee product page, and the video above walks through the 2027 changes in the editor.