I have 10k+ images and of course my F: image might be hiding somewhere in the Photos view with another date on it, but that would be an even greater puzzle than its absnce from the bottom of my Photos view. I can be sure of this because I have dated it in the Manage view with Database Date set as today, which will be the only image with that date. Yet the image is not present in Photos (refreshed).

Plainly that image is now in the database/catalog. I exit and renter ACDSee (for complete safety that db is actually updated) and can see the metadata still in Manage and can filter for it in Keywords. I also have an image - outside the database - on F: and in Manage I now browse to it and give it some metadata. After the build of the database I view the summary in Photos. My images are held on drive E:/data/images and this is how I told ACDSee to catalog (verb). To investigate further, following your kind input, I did the following: Photo view=Catalog contents Manage view=device contents?) (Possibly, but I cannot verify for sure because I am a bit wary of rebuilding my catalog after I have done a lot of tagging, the Catalog content is shown in the Photo view, and files not in the Catlog folders are excluded. So I am wondering what is the point of selecting folders and running the 'Catalog' action if you can work on everything anyway.? Any help in understanding appreciated. I cant see any difference in the folders in or out of the Catalog and I can act on (tag etc) files that are outside the folders preselected for Catalog, in the same way as those which are from folders marked for Catalog. However then I click on the Folders tab in Manage view, and there I see a tree view of all folders on my local machine, and I can click on and view any folders, whether marked for Catalog or not.

I would then expect to be able to explore the contents of the folders I had selected, ie my Catalog. So I make my selection and the app goes off and (I suppose) creates the Catalog. and there I see the folders I can include in my Calalog (modified if desired by those I wish to Exclude). Please forgive a probably obvious newbee question, but I am struggling a little to understand exactly what a 'Catalog' is.

What is acdsee