The Best Photo Viewer I've Seen In Years. And It's Free. [1]

If you keep your photos on your computer as digital images, rather than storing them as prints in albums, then you'll need a decent program for viewing them.  There are plenty to choose from.  But in my experience, they're all very similar.  They do the same job, in the same way, and they are often too pretty for their own good.

I recently discovered a brilliant program called Diffractor, which is pretty close to the ideal image viewer as far as I'm concerned.

For a start, it's fast.  It's also a small download of less than 8 MB.  And it's free. And of course it's malware-free too, according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust.  But its features don't stop there.  You can view not just photos, but also play video and audio files too.  And if you want to tweak the photo you're viewing, you can adjust its colour, straighten it, and so on.

Perhaps best of all, though, is its support for metadata.

You may be aware that, within an image file such as a JPG, there's provision to store keywords, tags, a caption, and so on.  Not all image editors let you view or edit this data, but it's there.  And because it's stored within the image itself, it never gets lost.  Where the file goes, the metadata goes too.

Not only does Diffractor let you edit image metadata, but you can also search it too.  So as you gradually tidy up your collection of pictures, and add appropriate tags, finding all the photos of the kids from last year's holiday trip is now a piece of cake.

If you want to bring some order to your pictures, Diffractor is a stunningly useful program.  Take a look at the short getting-started video at http://www.diffractor.com/learn [3] to see what it's all about, then click through to the site's home page to download it.