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Introduction
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Image viewers belong to a software category where the quantity and quality of free programs makes it difficult to select just one product as a top pick. So, personal convenience will unavoidably appear as the ultimate factor for this review of free applications. And there's also the question of what exactly we mean by an "image viewer", as the name may sound a bit too restrictive. Digital photography has become so widely available that most pictures these days will linger in a memory drive and never be printed, because we can see them on screens. As a consequence, hundreds of tools are developed for the task, ranging from the ones that offer just the most basic handling to others with loads of features nobody will ever use. However, nowadays' average users are likely to demand some additional capabilities apart from the simple viewing and browsing functions. |
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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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. I don't know about Windows7 yet. 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 our users 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.
Imagine is 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.
Although their names look nearly identical, Imagina has nothing to do with Imagine, reviewed above. Actually, that's where similarities end. This application ('a next-generation image viewer and editing tool', the developers claim) is a perfect example of the new concepts based around 3-D technology, but much lighter on resources than Pictomio and others of this kind, because it doesn't use hardware acceleration, as far as I know. Thus, browsing speed isn't as fast either, even compared to "normal" viewers, and this is especially noticeable with bigger files. For instance, when opening my EOS 7D's 18-megapixel JPGs the program clearly stays behind the top performers, though this should mean no issue for average users, as their files will be half that size or less, typically. There may be some things I really miss (more customization for certain basic aspects, a built-in folder tree, support for PSDs, more straightforward management of some files like TIFF, etc.) and many other reasons why my workflow as a photographer won't (yet) fit what Imagina proposes at this seemingly early stage in its development. But photo pros are only a few among the vast lot of digicam users who just shoot JPG. And these will love it! I do love it too, believe it or not. Its absolutely outstanding features have captivated me. User experience is excellent and no other viewer I've seen shows that image quality or that zoom and pan smoothness. Both 2-D and 3-D graphics are amazing and even videos can be watched in this environment (with zooming and panning!). It offers state-of-the-art RAW support by using David Coffin's DCRAW along with its own algorithms, top quality editing functions, real color management and some useful tools, like the 'straighten picture along a line' that many users have been craving for. So many good things make it at least a must-try. Well, just in case it's not clear, I have no connection at all with the developers. It's obvious I like Imagina but, as you can see, it hasn't reached a place at the top. It might one day, though, if the already good work keeps improving and the drawbacks I mentioned above are ironed out. They are very near. (Requires .NET 2.0 or higher)
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 and are a bit awkward to use, 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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This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Marc Darkin. Registered site visitors can contact Marc by clicking here.