Subscribe to our Best Free Digital Image Viewer
|
In a Hurry?
|
 Go straight to the Quick Selection Guide |
|
Introduction
|
|
Image viewers belong to a software category where the quantity and quality of free programs is at least equal to that of commercial ones, so the selection isn't easy, and personal convenience will unavoidably appear as a main factor for this review. And there's also the question of what exactly we mean by an "image viewer". With so many contenders that offer loads of features like editing, filtering, batch processing, organizing, publishing and the rest, that name may be a bit too restrictive, as we always tend to demand some additional editing features apart from the basic viewing and browsing functions (this one is sine qua non, in my opinion). Thus many imaging applications overlap categories, and the differences for our review should be based mainly on the aspects of access speed, zooming capabilities, and other tasks not directly related to extensive image editing. Though I know many users will prefer all-in-one programs, I feel they don't fit into this category, and feature bloat precludes their recommendation. Remember also that file format and size (in bytes) as well as image dimensions (in pixels) all have an influence on speed, and hardware is another important factor. Obviously, the better your machine (especially the graphics card, rather than the processor), the better the performance and loading times. |
|
Discussion
|
|
These three programs also support basic video viewing for the most common formats. A long comparative review of FastStone and XnView with my own trials can be found on the last page of the comments section below (04/27/2008).
Please help us by rating this review |
|
Related Products and Links
|
|
I've tested quite a few other applications (too many to be mentioned), but none of them made it to the top. That includes all of those suggested by readers. When this was the case, I usually replied with a post in the comments section with my reasons. Maybe your favorite program is among them, but please don't hesitate to submit any product you think might deserve a try. There are some decent ones and even Windows' built-in viewer performs acceptably when browsing through average images, although it's very limited. Anyway, all of my working PCs run Windows XP, though I have tried Vista's capabilities for the matter on several other machines and things don't seem to have improved much. But it wouldn't be fair to end this review without mentioning some other freebies that offer a few remarkable features. (Thanks to those anonymous visitors for letting me know.)
One of them is Imagine, a very fast viewer vaguely resembling Irfan in its simplistic interface. Similarly, wheel zooming needs pressing the Ctrl key and the program also uses a separate window for thumbnails, but Imagine adds more functionality for people who like it this way and several thumbnail windows can be open at the same time. Besides, it lets you customize various mouse modes with different configurations and select any of them instantaneously to fit your workflow, allows frame extraction from animations, reads a lot of formats, has multilanguage support and is portable. On the downside, it's quite limited in other areas. To name but a few, the editing and batch processing options are insufficient (I haven't been able to find a cropping feature!), certain Photoshop PSD files aren't properly displayed, no RAW or video formats are supported and it doesn't keep a database, so the thumbnails have to be generated again every time you visit a folder, although it's quite fast at doing this.
Pictomio is a good representative of the recent trends in this category, which pay greater attention to "fancy" interfaces and presentations to improve user experience. The main drawback with this is the usually high resource consumption and graphics card requirements, and the program is no exception, as it uses DirectX hardware acceleration. I'd say it is mainly geared to organizing, with a great number of options for tagging, metadata editing, rating and grouping, but it performs very well as a viewer, too. It's really fast once the thumbnail indexing has finished and displays an image preview instantly, and you can zoom in and out to any level. It supports some video formats as well. The interface is really nice and its many tabs show a lot of information. Pictomio, however, is not intended to edit and there are no options for this other than lossless rotation. There's no support for RAW, PSD or animated GIF formats either. Moreover, indexing should be faster and it fails to generate a thumbnail for some really big files, but the picture is displayed perfectly if you click on its blank rectangle.
An anonymous visitor suggested cam2pc and, after giving it a try, it has proved to be an excellent program in many aspects. As the name suggests, cam2pc provides a handy way to download pictures and videos from your digicam to your drives, allowing you to use lots of options for renaming, saving, etc., and has specific support for the widely used Canon EOS cameras (separate download). The interface is intuitive and easy to use, with a folder and thumbnail view that recalls FastStone. As with this, I recommend to turn the preview panel off, though thumbnail generation is really fast. Actually, speed is outstanding in almost every aspect of this app. The feature that impressed me most was its ability to quickly display LZW-compressed TIFs, something unusual in its competitors, although these perform better with Photoshop PSDs. The only reason why I don't include cam2pc along with the top programs is that the freeware version lacks quite a lot of features that can only be found in its commercial sibling and which the others offer for free. But I guess most users could perfectly do without those.
After some debate in the comments section I've decided to mention FastPictureViewer, but just because of one single feature. This claims to be (and probably is) the fastest viewer ever, especially indicated for quick browsing and culling. Like Pictomio, it uses hardware to speed things up and requires a lot of system resources and graphic capabilities. It has a nice interface as well. Anyway, the program offers no other functions and is limited to just viewing, and the free version supports JPGs only. It does support full color space awareness, though, and there's also a standalone codec package that allows functionality for 20 RAW formats from the most important camera manufacturers under 32/64bit Vista or Windows 7 and provides thumbnail view for XP.
Finally, one of our site users, Mythril, suggested two programs which work with a very different approach, but with a special focus on speed. These are Vjpeg and Osiva. I just quote Mythril's comments because they are right on spot (original 06/02/09): "Both work by opening images in a borderless window that you can drag around and zoom in/out at will, practically without any lag, and you can open as many images as you want at the same time. Both programs load very quickly, but don't have any features to speak of. Another drawback is that there doesn't even seem to be a way to cycle through images in a directory... Osiva is slightly better in that you can easily drag and drop a bunch of images and have it open all of them for a superquick overview". I'll add they support very few file formats, but Vpej and Osiva are quite different from what I had seen so far. This impressive entry in the Wikipedia features a chart comparing a considerable amount of free and commercial image viewers. Most of these products are also given detailed individual entries and include links to their websites. Best Free Digital Photo Organizer |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
1.96 
Private Freeware (not free for commercial use) 
Windows, MacOS X, Linux x86, Linux ppc, FreeBSD x86, OpenBSD x86, NetBSD x86, Solaris sparc, Solaris x86, Irix mips, HP-UX, AIX
This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Marc Darkin. Registered site visitors can contact Marc by clicking here.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Please rate this article
Well...
I don't saw any word about FuturixImager (http://fximage.com/imager/)
I think that you can try to write if this program is a good alternative or not...
I use XnView, but I find on the net FuturixImager and I am curious to read about your opinions...
Greetz!
FastStone Image Viewer 4.0 has been released.
Anupam
Thanks for letting me know, Anupam. Oddly enough I downloaded and installed version 3.9 on a PC just yesterday. So, I wouldn't have checked for a new one in a while! Anyway the new version doesn't appear on their official site yet???
Yeah, the new version was released on 19th, and the download sites are showing the release now.
The official site do have the new version. I confirmed it, and then downloaded. Here is the download link on the official site. It clearly says 4.0 with the release date of 19th Nov in red.
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDownload.htm
Anupam
http://www.majorgeeks.com/FastStone_Image_Viewer_d4691.html
I think they made a mistake though ...
What do you mean, a mistake?
If you want to view your RAW files from your DSLR in a 32 or 64 bit Windows environment then this free codec pack is what you probably need:
http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/
Info from the website:
Windows Vista introduced a modern and extensible imaging framework called Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The operating system comes with built-in support for several common image formats including jpeg, bmp, png, gif, tiff and HD Photo. WIC makes it possible for 3rd parties to add first-class support for image formats to Windows, complete with thumbnails in Explorer, preview and slideshow support in Photo Gallery / Photo Viewer and metadata search integration.
The FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack provides such platform support for additional formats through read-only image decoders, simultaneously available in both 32 and 64-bit flavor.
WIC-enabled image viewers such as Windows Live™ Photo Gallery, Windows 7's Media Center and our own FastPictureViewer Professional "automagically" gain the ability to open and view new image formats, play slideshows etc, so does all .NET 3.x and WPF-based applications.
Thanks for the info. As you can see, Fast Picture Viewer is mentioned in my article, but this is a nice standalone package that many users will welcome. I'll add this to my review.
Thanks again
Due to our server problems during last weekend, a few of the latest comments have been lost and unfortunately can't be recovered. Our apologies.
Here's my problem:
Windows Photo Gallery won't open my saved pictures. It says "file format is not supported." To fix this issue, I downloaded K-Lite Codec Pack. But once I try to install it, it says "error creating registry key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" followed by various extensions (.3g2, mp4, .vob, etc.) So what do I do?
Two answers were given in the forums (thanks Jojoyee and J.L.):
"Windows Photo Gallery supports these file types: BMP, JPG, JFIF, TIFF, PNG, WDP. If Windows Movie Maker is installed, it can also play videos in these formats: ASF, AVI, MPEG, WMV.
It would be helpful to know:
What is the format of your saved pictures?
Can the picture files be viewed by other viewers?"
"Do they open fine with Paint?
Tell the reader that K-Lite Codec Pack is for audio and video only, not pictures.
Lastly, the file associations seems to be corrupt in the registry. Check them (XP: Tools>Folder Options>File Types, Vista/7: Start>Default Programs>Associate a file type or protocol with a program)."
There're a few questions raised. Please check back the forum thread here.
I'm no tech guy at all and unfortunately I can't help you with your problem. Anyway, I'll post your message in the forums and see if someone can. Sorry.
Meanwhile, I suggest that you download and install any of the programs reviewed here and probably you'll be able to see your pictures again.
To continue: I just realized that my "save picture" function only saves pictures as either ART (*.art) or bitmap (*.bmp) though the picture shows it as an "http://....jpg" extension. When I try to view the picture, it clearly says that it is indeed a JPEG image, yet it was saved as .art or .bmp. Could this be the problem?
You might want to try IrfanView which is able to detect the correct picture type upon opening a file saved as other file type than the correct one.
Some other programs do not auto-detect the file type and it would just fail to open the file.
Tried Irfanview and it didn't help.
My pictures do not open with other programs. I tried several. Windows Photo Gallery says only JPEG, GIF, BMP, and ART images can be displayed. It seems most photos are "jpg" which is not supported. I have the latest version of WPG. I downloaded an update just to make sure. Strange, I never had any problem saving pictures from the Net and viewing them with my Windows XP Pro desktop.
JPEG (Joint Picture Experts Group) is the generic name for that format, but the usual file extension you'll find is .jpg or .JPG, so there shouldn't be any problem with that. The same applies to TIFF (Tagged Image Format File), which you'll find as a .tif or .TIF extension.
I don't really know what's happening in your case and am sorry I can't help, but it probably doesn't have anything to do with file extensions.
Why is not Picasa?
Picasa is reviewed in another category (http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-digital-photo-organizer.htm) because it isn't an image viewer, though it can be used as such. I've already answered this question here before, though I know it takes some time to delve into the comments section. I do use Picasa myself, but the reasons to exclude it from my article at that time remain almost the same through the latest versions. Quote (07/16/2008):
"The reason why Picasa (and some other cool software) doesn't get a mention here is basically explained in the first two paragraphs of my article. And yes, sure it is a very capable program, probably (and maybe questionably too) the best for organizing pictures, but I don't think it's a good candidate to stand among the best image viewers.
The following is a fragment from the long comments I wrote mainly about XnView and FastStone further down this page:
""Picasa is great, too, but not as straightforward as it should for my needs, and even basic functions like saving files appear somewhat tricky. Anyway, its fancy look, the various methods for organizing and gathering pictures together into unlimited custom folders without actually moving them from their original locations, and the web publishing abilities can be really attractive to a lot of users. And it comes from Google ;)""
[...] Besides, the management of external hard drives is ridiculously complicated with all those imports and exports to your main drive and back. Couln't it show all the drives in the system directly in the tree under My PC? I might be doing things in a wrong way; if so, please somebody tell me. But an application like this should show basic things like that clearly from the first time you run it, be more intuitive and make your workflow easier. This isn't the case, unfortunately for a piece of otherwise great software."
I tried WildBit v5.5 and -for some reason- the image association didn't work on Windows 7 x64.
Hi,
Have you tried to run Viewer as admin? Anyway this issue should be fixed in next version.
- Marko
Hi,
Just released new Alpha version. So now its not required to run as admin unless running with restricted account.
- Marko
Good to know you're there, Marko. Thanks again.
Perhaps Marko, WB's developer, will see your message and have something to say about it. Sorry I can't help you.
Hi,
I'm wondering which one is the best to reduce/enlarge screenshoots? Most programs i've tried don't resample images correctly.
If you want to resample an image, most of the programs reviewed here can do a good job, as long as it means just reducing size. MC suggests FastStone and that's a very good choice. It offers quite a lot of options for the matter and, in my own tests, it beats most others in output quality and generates the lightest output files for the same sizes and compressions (with compressed formats, of course). The only one in my article that can rival (and even beat) FS in this aspect is Irfan View, another very good choice, but maybe not so straightforward to use, and WildBit Viewer does a decent job as well. XnView's results in this field are a bit disappointing for an otherwise excellent program. FS's developers also have a free specialized app, FS Resizer, which works just as well as its sibling, is very simple to use and has a portable version:
http://www.faststone.org/download.htm
But enlarging is a very different story. If you're planning to use these programs for upsampling and then printing, I'm afraid you're out of luck. When you take a screenshot of an average monitor (say 1024x768), the resolution you get is exactly the same as the monitor's, 1024x768 pixels, or 0.79 megapixels, which is quite smaller than even most cellphone cameras reach nowadays. And things don't get much better with larger screens, as you'd need a really big one to get the necessary pixels for a quality print. Even in this case, the final printed output would be very poor, as the points on any screen can never compare to the photosites on a digital camera sensor.
And this is why enlarging the screenshots won't look good either, as the picture will always degrade because you can't have more detail than what you've already got. The software tries to 'guess' the pixels you're adding to make the image larger, and the bigger, the worse.
To enlarge an image, SmillaEnlarger is probably a better free tool which can produce higher quality image. It might have a better 'guess' to add pixels, still degrading though.
I use FastStone Capture for the images and the viewer to edit without any problems
There is no 64-bit version of FastStone, and there probably will never be.
You're right. Thanks for ponting it out. FastStone runs under 64bit Windows but there's no specific 64bit version of the program. I don't remember how I got the wrong information, but I should have looked better. My apologies. It's corrected now.
Great article. I was looking for something to replace my ancient ACDSee app. Tried all of your top 4 recommendations - I've been using IrfanView for some time but I really dislike the lack of integration with the slide show module, and the options (although many) are confusing.
XnView and FastStone are excellent and give me everything I need - particularly the latter with the easily accesible options when viewing an image on full screen.
WildBit - good interface but one 'feature' that makes it unuseable for me - (apologies if this has been mentioned before) if you browse in Explorer or similar and then double click on an image, it opens and displays (all well and good), however on pressing 'Esc' the focus returns to the WildBit app (previously not running) instead of back to Explorer. A real pain and not something any of the other apps do.
Keep up the good work!
Hi,
In WildBit Viewer 5.5 -> Tools -> Options -> Startup & General tab -> Change option: Mode when Starting with Image to Exit Viewer.
- Marko
Thanks, Marko. It's a joy to have you there!!!
np :)
- Marko
Thanks for your comments. I've never experienced what you mention with WildBit but I'm sure Marko (its developer) will see your report and do something about it.
Cam2pc freeware edition is a good image browser. Please give your comment.
See my article above with cam2pc reviewed.
Thanks for your review. One of the item I like in this software is I can directly link to 3rd Party software for editing, in my case I am using Corel Paint Shop Pro.
A lot of the programs reviewed here can do that too.
Thanks for the tip. I'll have a look as soon as possible, but it might take a while.
I've tried most of these and while some of them do a great job, I'm looking for a better slideshow function since my family likes to torture our guests during family occasion with slideshows :P
They are customizable in seconds, meaning all photo will be shown in duration of seconds, not frames per second.
If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
You said: "I've tried most of these and while some of them do a great job, I'm looking for a better slideshow function since my family likes to torture our guests during family occasion with slideshows."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! :)
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean exactly.
Photographs are frames themselves, so no frames/second measure can be applied to a slideshow. Wildbit offers one the most extensive ranges of possibilities for slideshow I have seen, though unfortunately, it has no exporting capabilities yet.
As far as I know, measuring in fr/s only applies to file formats with animations or movies.
AlSee no longer freeware!
Detail http://www.altools.com/home/news.aspx?&articleIdx=8&m=3
Thank you for letting me know, Leminhdung. I have removed ALSee from my review.
Fast Stone Image Viewer 3.9 is out!
Thanks.
Marc
I've mostly been using IrfanView and XnView for picture viewing, but recently I've tried to look for quicker photo viewers, and I've tested the following two:
http://www.stereopsis.com/vjpeg/
http://www.noping.net/kent/osiva/
Both work by opening images in a borderless window that you can drag around and zoom in/out at will, practically without any lag, and you can open as many images as you want at the same time. Both programs load very quickly, but doesn't have any features to speak of. Another drawback is that there doesn't even seem to be a way to cycle through images in a directory... Osiva is slightly better in that you can easily drag and drop a bunch of images and have it open all of them for a superquick overview.
I guess FastPictureViewer might be just as quick as those two programs, with more functions, but I haven't tried it since it requires buying a license for use at work.
Anyways, those two programs almost deserve a category by themselves as fast-loading single photo viewers. Maybe.
these look like just what I am looking for but neither seem to work. any suggestions??
Post new comment