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Introduction
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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. |
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Discussion
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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).
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Related Products and Links
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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.
Given the good reputation earned by Ashampoo's products in so many different kinds of software, you might want to try Photo Commander 6. Now they have released the new version 7, the old one is free after online registration. The features are too many to be mentioned (please follow the link above) but it does very well as a viewer, with the plus that it can handle any type of multimedia file. If you work with other programs, the interface and layout may look a bit too different from what you've seen, but one gets used to it after a while and then sees how powerful the app can be for an average user. Not everything is perfect, however, and PhC6 doesn't let you open an image until all the thumbnails in the folder are generated; actually, the program hangs for a while every time I try to do so in that process, and the same happens with every machine where I've installed it. But it can be my settings, as other users report no such problems at all. Also, some really big files fail to have a thumbnail displayed. This is the download link if you want to try an application that will meet almost everybody's needs, but be prepared to receive Ashampoo's ads in your mail at least four times a week.
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.
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 |
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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.
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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.
My review is updated with the programs you suggested. I included your own comments. Thanks for your contribution.
Marc
Thanks for your contribution. I had never heard about the programs you suggest but, after visiting their sites, they seem to have a nice approach and I'll try them both. Most likely, they won't get to the top because of their lack of features, but they might be mentioned along with FastPictureViewer in the "speed section" of my review.
Please see my reply on the previous post regarding my usual time constraints. Anyway, your own comments on the apps are very informative and I'm sure many people will take them into consideration as I have.
By the way, the free version of FastPV is really fast but has no other features than simple viewing and supports JPG only. I'm sure Osiva and VJPG both offer a few more.
Marc
FuturixImager
- fairly fast
- simply
- free for private and commercial usage
I've reviewed FuturixImager and these are my opinions:
I said I had tried older versions but I still see the same drawbacks. There are several of these.
First, I believe browsing capabilities are fundamental in a viewer and this program offers no folder tree view, so you can't really browse your directories in a convenient way, as you always have to access them through the 'open' tab or the 'file' menu. This reason alone makes it unsuitable for my personal workflow, though I guess others can live without it. But that's not all.
Similarly, there's no thumbnail window, which leads us to the previous point. I don't see much functionality with this kind of approach. Just imagine browsing through folders with hundreds of pics when you're looking for one whose name you don't remember, only by clicking on the 'previous - next' arrows. How long will it take to identify it in Futurix?
If the program were fast, this problem could be alleviated, but then there's the speed issue too. I find it to be significantly slower than most of the programs I review in my article. Average images(2-5mpx) load with almost no delay, but 10-megapixel JPGs report a different story already. Either larger images or LZW-compressed TIFs or RAW files can make you wait beyond your patience. And there's no support for animated GIFs.
Of course, having no possibility to select several files at a time means there are no batch processing options, which is something I'm beginning to appreciate as a fundamental feature in a viewer.
These personal inconveniences won't be a concern for many users, and Futurix does have some good points as well. For example, although there's no kind of control over the process, the rendering of RAW files (at least Canon's CR2) is top quality, but at the expense of time, as I said above. That lack of options will need further postprocessing, which can be done inside the program because the filters and adjustments are good enough. However, there's multilevel undo but no redo at all.
Having said this, I'm sure you can understand it if Futurix isn't listed among the other products in my article. But thanks for the tip anyway.
Marc
Thanks for your suggestion. I already knew about Futurix and tried a couple of older versions back in 2005 and 2007. It's impossible for me to keep up to date with the new releases of all the programs I've reviewed before, so I just follow the ones I considered most promising at the time of their review.
Futurix wasn't among these then, but after your post I've had a look at its site to see what's new and I'll check the current version, as it seems to have improved substantially. Anyway, it will have to wait for its turn. I'm sorry about that, but a couple of other programs are under trial too; a fair review needs time and I don't usually have much. Check here once in a while, though, as my comments on the app will certainly appear sooner or later.
Marc
Hi!
Nice review. I myself like XnView a lot, and never understood why it didn't appear in other reviews so often as it should. Nevertheless, I have a negative aspect to point out: its poor capability to compress pictures when you edit or convert, specially in png format.
Agree. Any of the other top 4 programs perform better in that aspect.
Marc
I think PicPerk covers what the standard user actually needs from an image viewer, such as resizing, red eye reduction, cropping etc. It's also very quick and exceptionally straightforward to use.
http://www.picperk.com/
I've reviewed PicPerk finally. Here's what I think.
The program is reasonably fast when opening pictures and thumbnail quality is excellent for their size. It does a good job with its set of possibilities for common adjustments, although they are very simplified in general. I particularly liked the perspective function, and the sharpening filter and others give good results as well. But I'm afraid this isn't enough for the app to qualify.
It's obviously difficult to stand out against my top 4 programs, but even the related products in my review above offer more general functionality than PicPerk. I'm not talking about providing lots of features, but about saving the user unneded clicks and things like that.
To begin with, there's no tree view available and you have to access folders through the 'open folder' window. Besides, it arranges thumbnails into different pages (just 12 per page on my screen) and you must either use shortcuts or click on those 'first - previous - next - last' buttons to browse through. Then there's no wheel action and no shortcuts at all for zooming, just those good old loupe icons to click on. Moreover, once you've zoomed in, panning is painfully achieved by dragging the scroll bars on the right and bottom, and that isn't smooth at all because the bars aren't very responsive and when you pull them with the mouse the image doesn't move till you release the button.
Add to this the fact that it doesn't support animated GIFs, RAWs or (most important to me) LZW-compressed TIFs and you'll know why PicPerk won't appear in my article. I think users have quite a lot of better products to choose from, or at least just as good as PP. And as you can see, I don't recommend them either.
Anyway, thanks again for your suggestion.
Marc
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out, but it may take a while.
Marc
The following is a message which was mailed to my site account by a reader in February. It took me a while to review his suggested program but I had to find the necessary time. My reply goes next. I've also updated my article above and included a new product, so the time seems to have come at last.
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Hello Marc,
Here's another nice program you might want to take a look at:
http://www.vallen.de/freeware/
Vallen JPegger is a simple picture viewer with zooming action, no video support, BUT mp3, wav-Support and a feature I was looking for for several years now.
Vallen JPegger is capable of showing all pics in all subdirectories without having to go from dir to dir like IrfanView and the others do. Simple check the show pics from all directories (below the current) and you only have to decide whether you want them by name (i.e. pic1, pic1, pic1, pic2, pic2, pic2) or by directory (pic1, pic2, pic3, pic1, pic2, pic3).
It has a little tool to make autostarting cds with JPegger starting after inserting the cd and a tool to export mp3-file listings to Excel.
It probably has some more tricks up its sleeve (scanner support) but I wanted to contribute asap.
It is of course freeware for private users.
And no, I am not involved in any kind with Vallen Software.
Have fun.
Thomas from Berlin, Germany
Thanks for your suggestion, Thomas. I've reviewed JPegger and it is a nice viewer in a few aspects. The interface looks somewhat like WildBit's and even their speed is alike, but that's just about where all similarities end.
Sure those features you mention will be neat for some users and the fact that it handles MP3 and WAV can be a great addition for others, but the limitations are important in my opinion. And it's not a matter of their number, but of their importance. For example, it has insufficient batch processing options (lacking a few I wouldn't live without), editing capabilities are limited to rotation and resizing (not important to me, but probably others will miss more versatility) and it doesn't support RAW files (critical to me).
Besides, and this is worse, many times I've found it a little buggy when carrying out certain operations. For instance, some folders where all the thumbnails had already been created got messed up when I tried to display them by "All files", "Images+Sounds" and the rest of the options. Many thumbnails had to be generated again every time and not only a lot of them failed to appear at all, they even seem to have disappeared forever! Yes, you can display the corresponding full image if you click on its blank space, but this is quite inconvenient.
All these drawbacks make it impossible for me to recommend JPegger, although many other users are likely to find something to appreciate in it, like you did.
Thanks again for your contribution.
Marc
I'd like to suggest "Ashampoo Photo Commander 6" they recently offered it for FREE after they launched the new version 7, still version 6 is pretty good imo.
Download (official website):
http://r.ashampoo.com/r.php?id=22516&ri=0fci&u=8675123&lk=RtjRRqyg
Note: after installing you can get product key by going to registration form from [software –> Internet] menu
I hope you find this useful.
~Yaser
Yaser,
Please see my updated article above, which includes PC6 now. Thanks again for letting me know.
Marc
Marc,
I've read your review and I'm glad you like it because I sure did :)
I been using FastStone's for as long as I can remember until I tried PC6 and now it's all I use.
About the problems you mentioned, I tried to recreate them but it never happened with me, the program didn't crash at all and I could open any image even when the thumbnails were still being generated, I also tried a couple of somewhat large images and still worked fine. The only side effect in both cases was slight delay...
Note: I tested it on Windows XP SP3, X86.
~Yaser
My test OSs are Win XP SP2 and SP3. It could be my settings, but it's strange the same thing happened in all three machines. In all the cases I used the same setup.exe I downloaded from the link you provided and ran it from a USB flash. Maybe a corrupt installation file? I'll reinstall it with a fresh download and see what happens.
Marc
I've reinstalled it as I said and the problems persist in all the machines. It doesn't crash now when I try to open an image during thumbnail generation, but it hangs for a long while and won't open it. I can't even see the newly created thumbnails till all of them are done.
The same happens with failing thumbnails. Where I say "really big files" I'm talking about some panoramic images between 60-110 megapixels in size. Yes, that's huge. Actually, very few users will ever have to cope with such files, so no problem.
Marc
Marc, you said earlier that you "ran it from a USB flash."
IF that's you really did, may I suggest you wipe all traces with Revo Unistaller, then COPY the setup file to your C drive and install from there.
What I ran from a USB flash was the setup file, of course, and only on two offline machines, as the online one had downloaded and run it locally. But that was just the first time.
For this other installation I did exactly as you say (I always use Revo to uninstall) and transferred the setup to C. The results are those above.
Thanks for your suggestion. Ashampoo's reputation is good enough to make PC6 worth a look. But please see my reply to Tony's comment just below this one. Time is getting scarce for me these days!
Marc
Here's a viewer that is a good viewer, its called GiniPic.
http://www.ginipic.com/
GiniPic like a lot of viewers you see won't view your pics on your computer but will search out in Flicker, Google, Photobucket and many other places over the web. It may be of some use to some of you and one Marc might want to look at. The only thing that bugs me in this as in so many viewers, you can't get access to your photo imaging software, I would have thought that to be a fundamental concept of finding an image and most of the time opening it up to work on. But as a viewer it works well and that added bonus if you search the web for images or keep pics in Flickr etc, its very good.
Tony
Thanks for the suggestion, Tony. I'll take a look but unfortunately my current lack of time won't let it be very soon.
I'm also reviewing another two apps at the moment and at least one of them is very likely to end up in my article. I guess the number of programs I mention is already too high, but nice ones appear from time to time and they deserve a few lines.
Marc
Hi,
I was looking for a feature like to add Watermark or Text in batch. And I've found FastStone image viewer got this in somewhat best way, i.e. with a user friendly wizard + Wysywyg (What you See, What you Got) editor for doing tasks in batch.
Check its Slide Show Builder, its awesome. You can export to .exe slide shows in order to distribute easily
Overall, its the best Free Image Viewer Utility I have ever seen. All thumbs up :)
All four best picks above (IrfanView - my personal favorite, XnView, FastStone and WildBit) are free for non commercial use only. Could someone give advices for the best completely free image viewer?
Thanks,
Marco
The only one I found is imgv which is open-source: http://imgv.sourceforge.net/
Hi Marko:
To my surprise, I found out that most picture editors do not update their thumbnails. For example, when you crop a picture, the thumbnail still displays the full picture. Imagine the potentially embarassing situations ;)
I mentioned the 'problem' to Irfan(View), but while he quickly pointed out the mechanism, he did not seem to be interested in doing something about it.
QFactor
Hi QFactor,
True.. EXIF image can be different than actual image :)
Anyway. I'm currently changing/fixing that function in Editor. So in the next Alpha: Update EXIF image and EXIF orientation is on by default. When making changes like cropping/rotating. EXIF image is updated and also orientation is changed to Top Left. Both settings can be turned off if not wanting to update EXIF image or EXIF orientation.
- Marko
Thanks Marko, much appreciated.
If I could make one more wish: Ability to lock aspect ratio when defining the crop borders. Or if that is too much too ask, perhaps a live display to let us know what the current aspect ratio is.
QFactor
Hi,
Okay. Just launched new Alpha version :)
- Marko
hmm. Okay. I can make ex. fixed aspect ratio selections. I will take a look this soon :)
- Marko
Do any of the applications mentioned show the aspect ratio of the image directly? I know I can calculate it from the displayed pixel size but hey I am lazy, it would be nice if it was just displayed.
By aspect ratio I assume you mean 3:2 or 4:3 or whatever, in which case I don't know of any program which shows it. No doubt it would be a nice addition for developers to include.
If you want to know the size in megapixels without having to calculate it, FastStone displays it, and as far as I know WildBit will implement that in a future version.
Marc
Yes that is what I meant but I would prefer decimal numbers like 1.500 or 1.333.
I have found a plugin (ImgSize) for Total Commander (a Windows Explorer replacement) that does this but that program is shareware. In addition to being lazy I am also cheap so to have this available in a free solution would be ideal.
Hi,
hmm. Its not hard to add. So I will add that to next WildBit Viewer - Alpha version.
- Marko
Marko,
It's a pleasure to see how reponsive you are to users' requests. This is to your advantage and users will really appreciate it. Thanks for your nice work.
Marc
Thanks Marc,
Just released another Alpha version (Aspect Ratio included) :)
- Marko
Thank you very much. I opened a folder of images, selected an image, then clicked on the "show image info" button and the aspect ratio was shown. I was able to cycle through the images quickly finding the ones that needed a change in aspect ratio by leaving the image info displayed and clicking on the "display next image" button. The only thing that would have made it easier is if the aspect ratio was displayed with the size in the image info shown below the preview pane.
Thanks again.
A weakness of XNView is the inablity to customise hotkeys and the use of 2 key combos for important commands like Real Size, as I prefer to keep one hand on the mouse or tablet pen, so hotkeys on the far right or num pad are pretty inconvenient.
Also afaik, it does not properly support embedded colour profiles, which Faststone does.
I forgot to add that you can't drag and rearrange thumbnails on the browser screen, which again you can do in Faststone.
does anyone know of any viewers that can be configured to open images in same window to use as my newsreaders viewer? Thanx
Hi,
WildBit Viewer (Editor part) can open images to same window. So then images can be ex. compared easily.
- Marko
I don't really understand your question. What exactly do you mean by "same window"? Your web browser's window?
Marc
marc,
Could you send one tiff and one psd image in to my mail so I can optimize loading speed.
- Marko
Can't quite figure out why XnView isn't your first choice. One more reason is it's ability to find duplicates. Click Tools > Find similar files. It will find them via filename, file data, or similar content. Careful on the last one, set slider to 95 or it takes forever.
I'd been on the lookout for a program that would deal with duplicates and after reading this article, thought I should check XnView...Voila!
It actually IS my top pick (look in the quick selection details). I began the review with Irfan, but that's just a matter of style.
Marc