Tag: viewer

New Image Viewer: Mouser’s Media Browser

Mouser at DonationCoder has restarted work on an image viewer that will be part of the site’s annual NANY (New Apps for the New Year).

Mouser’s Media Browser is not aimed at competing with well known image viewers such as IrfanView and others but when running the program it does better than most in generating thumbnails for example. Its development has been fast in recent days with many releases and it has already improved in several ways, including the speed in which it generates thumbnails and how fast it scans recursively to find images within subfolders.

The program shows a navigation tree with the user picking the folder to view, either via the tree or by browsing to a folder. It is also possible to filter files, for example showing only gifs by just typing gif in the filter bar. There is also a grid mode which eliminates the image preview pane. The program options (File —> Options) has settings with minimum and maximum thumbnail size.

By default it comes with a thumbnail strip open. Another open by default view is the virtual tree which divides images by date showing how many by month and year. Future releases may include other virtual trees that divide media by tags or other attributes. These can be turned off via the Tree menu.

The program can open an image using an external image viewer and it also integrates with Mouser’s other tools like Screenshot Captor and Automatic Screenshotter.

December 20, 2019
Seymour: Portable Freeware Image Viewer

Seymour (version:0.9.10) is a freeware image viewer with basic editing features, it is also portable.

Seymour is one of the newer entries in the image viewing world and it packs a good number of features in a lightweight download and shares similarities with XnView.

Images can be rated, categorized and tagged and a separate pane is available to view and find categorized images. Files can be grouped or filtered by filename, those tagged or not and those categorized or not and folders can be bookmarked too.

Beyond viewing many formats and moving and copying them there are basic editing features like resize, crop, rotate, grayscale, brightness, hue, auto level and format conversion to name a few. Seymour also supports scripts with some included like listing of images ready to copy into the clipboard, saving views or layouts, moving files based on properties and replacing text in file names and extensions.

One additional features is Search for images online (under Tools menu or right click the image) which uses google images to find similar images, this is in addition to the local Find similar images which will filter and display similar images in the current folder.

The program does feel sluggish at times, especially in the preview pane (see screenshot for one example of two images being overlayed after one is clicked after the other) but also the menu structure, for example List artists is under both File and Scripts menus.

Seymour is sqlite based and works on Windows XP and newer and supports touchscreen gestures.

November 28, 2016
Honeyview Is An Useful Image Viewer

Honeyview is an image viewer made by the developers of the Bandizip archiver. Therefore it is not surprising that it is possible to view images inside zip, rar, tar, alz, lzh or 7z archive formats without extracting them.

Honeyview requires the user to load a folder via a right click anywhere in the program window or the left most button on the bottom controls. Then it lets the user view the images in several way, like fit in window and fit to width but also “Smart double page” which made no difference or didn’t work in testing png and jpg files. These are probably set up to work with tiff or other formats. It is also possible to view files in a slideshow with many delay choices and limited set of transition effects. Folder bookmarks make using the program more efficient. Honeyview is also an image editor with rotate, crop, resize and change format settings via the menu and others like gamma adjustment, flip or sharpen via right click on an image. The user can choose to launch an image in an external editor as well. It is also possible to move and copy images around “Photo folders”. The folders can be defined in the program’s settings.

The program settings (F5) add a whole set of tweaks like turning off the screensaver, changing the program language, more control over navigating with the mouse and keyboard, associating the program with different image formats, caching images, using different image profile data and better using the exif data to view and manage images,

The program’s only skin is the Windows 8 looking one. Honeyview is available in both portable and exe downloads and also supports grabbing GPS data with locations looked up using Google maps.

August 18, 2014
Hornil Photo Viewer: New Lightweight Image Viewer

Hornil Photo Viewer (version: 1.0) is a new freeware for home use image viewer from the developer who brought us the very capable Hornil StylePix photoshop alternative.

Hornil Photo Viewer is pretty much no frills and there are certainly many more better known alternatives available but it fills the need well enough for a basic image viewer. It features a file tree on the left, several ways to list or view images in the main section and a histogram, waveform, exif info (and the option to remove the info) and thumbnail viewer on the right.

Other features included are full screen mode, view in slideshow, image zoom, flip, rotate and convert and a launcher for any external image editor. The familiar keyboard shortcuts are available too, for example Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn to navigate through images. The supported formatted are png, jpg, tif, bmp, ico, jpc, pcx, tga, tif, ico, jpc, jp2, pcx, pgx, pnm, pgm, ppm, ras, ska, wmf and tsp. Hornil Photo Viewer runs on XP and newer.

December 31, 2013
pViewer: Another Minimalist Image Viewer

pViewer (Version: 1.6) is a minimalist open source image viewer. It has no menu and little distraction.

pViewer’s options are available via right click and there are keyboard shortcuts for its features. These features are Send To Dropbox Public folder, rename, slideshow, rotate, flip, resize and read exif data. It supports effects such as invert, grayscale, sharpen, blur, brightness, contrast, tint, black border, white border and red eye correction. Additionally there is support for .zip, .rar, .cbz, .cbr archives with Manga and Comic mode displaying two images side by side.

The batch operations – resize, rotate, convert, rename, grayscale, invert white or back border – work on all images in the current directory and sometimes even without any additional prompts. For example Add White Border just goes to work and creates a subfolder containing the output.

The program settings has options for drawing and text color and fonts. These are not accessible via the right and looking at the keyboard shortcuts one sees the following

Crop: Ctrl+Click to make a selection, release the mouse button while still pressing Ctrl. Writing on the image: press Shift+Click on the picture to add text, write what you want, move it wherever you want with the mouse, press Ctrl+Enter.
Drawing a rectangle: Alt+Click and drag to draw, then you can save the edited image. Filling the rectangle: After drawing a rectangle you can fill it with the same color by pressing TAB

It is less than 1MB unzipped, doesn’t require installation and should run on Windows XP and newer.
Thanks to commenter andy for pointing out that it requires the .NET framework 4.0

March 24, 2013
Vieas: Image Viewer And Editor

Vieas (Version: 5.1.5.2) is a freeware image viewer with some editing features, it can be considered a lightweight alternative. The image formats it can can read or open are gif (including animated), jpg, png, bmp, tiff and it can read from zip (and other archive formats via plugins). There are no plugins currently available (?). The output or save formats are the same with few exceptions such as animated gifs.

The program’s interface is not a typical one because by default it opens without a menu or toolbar and they are only shown when the mouse is moved to the top of the program window. A menu is also shown with a right click. Vieas remains an image viewer until the ‘Change to edit window’ button (or Tab key) is pressed.

Vieas features crop, resize, canvas resize, rotation, mirror, flip, equalize, gamma, brightness, contrast, highlight, shadow, color balance, hue, saturation, replace color, negative, blur and a few others. It can also print, stay on top, show exif info, set images as wallpaper and features multi-monitor support.

The program’s options are available when right clicking or when in the edit window, they include the following.

Choosing how the program starts, with its main window, edit window or full screen. Toggling the ‘Change the window size to fit a displayed image’ and slideshow interval. Various zoom options that control quality and size of the image and window. Various options for mouse controls such as what double click, left click, mouse wheel and other combinations do. For example double click to full screen. Up to eight placeholders to launch external files or folders. These will be available via right click —> Tools. A plugins tab to add any of the aforementioned plugins. Finally the option to associate various image formats with Vieas and add it to the Send to menu.

Vieas is available in both installer and portable versions and requires Windows XP and newer.

January 5, 2013
Alternate Pic View: Freeware Image Tool

Alternate Pic View (Version: 1.424) is an image viewer and editor. It has features common to most image viewers. By default the Folder view (show thumbnails and explorer tree) and Allow multiple windows (view images in tabs) are toggled off or disabled. Click their respective icons to enable them (see image).

Alternate Pic View does full screen capture (File—>Capture) and another more advanced method via its Tools menu called Capturer. Here all open windows are listed and the user can choose which to capture (see image). Under Tools there is a convertor and icon extractor as well. The former can convert to any one of bmp, gif, ico, tiff and others with any of resize, keep metadata, mirror, flip, swap colors, pixelize, sharpen, grayscale and alien effect.

Alternate Pic View can resave image by adding increments, for example if image.jpg is open repeatedly clicking File—>Save numbered (F7) will save the image as image__0000.jpg, image__0001.jpg, etc. Copy, crop and paste operation are available, for both whole images and selections. Its collection of effects are rotate, mirror, invert alpha, sharpen, blur, contrast/brightness, adjust color, noisify, pixelize, relief, negative, grayscale, redeye reduction, swap colors, alien effect and random. Using the effects menu one can change the image size, extend the canvas size or more unusually split an image – either by image coordinates or by selection area.

Alternate Pic View can also work straight from a scanner with Twain source and it can also do slideshows. In some instances Alternate Pic View is not the most intuitive. Two features only become apparent only when an image is right clicked in the thumbnail area. First there is an image compare feature which compares two images but it is not obvious how the second one can be chosen or if it works at all. Second there is the animated gif feature which again doesn’t seem to do anything other than let the user click forward or rewind to view each individual frame.

On the editing side it has color picker, pen, pencil, brush, line, arrow, fill, brush, rectangle, round rectangle, ellipse and freehand. Of note is that Edit—>Find pictures will scan a folder for image files. Alternate Pic View should works on all Windows versions.

September 3, 2012
Freeware multi-platform image viewer: nomacs

nomacs image lounge (all lowercase? ) (Version: 0.3.2.5828 beta tested) is an open source image viewer for Windows, Linux, and Mac machines. It supports the most common image formats from jpg to gif (no animations however) and xmp to pgm and others including the raw format. It is capable of reading and displaying exif metadata. It offers faster than most thumbnail view of images in a folder and a player to view a folder ala a slideshow.

The program can also be viewed in full screen or various levels of transparency and in frameless mode where the image only is shown, floating over the background. The toggle between frameless and normal view is not exactly obvious but a quick search revealed it to be F10.

On the image editing side there is crop, resize and a ‘pseudo color function’ where one can play with hue, saturation and RGB color values using a slider.

nomacs also features a synchronization feature that will work on computers on the same network or LAN.

nomacs does indeed seem faster than most. It can be found in various Linux repositories and there is a Mac port as well. Its Windows version runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7 and is available in both portable and installer versions.

May 25, 2012
My ViewPad Is A Simple Graphics Viewer

My ViewPad (Version: 4.1.0 build 16212 tested) is a freeware image or graphics viewer that is also available for Mac and Linux. It supports over 100 formats, many of them both read and write. These include the common .jpg, .psd, .tiff, .raw, .ico and .gif formats to less common ones like .tga (Targa), .wmf (Windows Metafile), .pict, .psp (Paint Shop Pro) and others.

The interface is simple and straightforward. The image area includes right click support for Copy, Rename, Delete, Properties, and somehow oddly Open With and Preview. The latter two are for opening the images using another image viewer and Windows’ own picture viewer.

The menus on the right hand side of the program window are as follows:

File menu features Open, Reopen, Open Recent, Open Image Folder, Next Image, Previous Image, Save, Save As, Save As Wallpaper (centered, tiled, stretched, fit and clear desktop), Print, Acquire and Delete Image.

Info presents basic info like path, size, dpi, (jpg) mode, color space, compression and similar info depending on the image format.

Edit features Undo, Redo, Flip, Rotate, Scale, Crop, Color Corrections (Gamma, Brightness, Contrast, Auto levels and Auto contrast), Copy, Copy Full Path, Paste, Clear and Change Checksum.

View features Zoom in, Zoom out, Actual size, Best fit, Full screen and EXIF or Page options relevant to the various formats.

Tools includes settings and associations. The former features Rendering quality and Raw interpolation, among others. My ViewPad should run on all Windows versions.

February 20, 2012
Freeware Shorts: WildBit Viewer (Image Viewer)

WildBit Viewer (Version: 5.9 as of this post) is an image viewer complete with support for many image formats. Its interface is divided into a explorer type tree, a file list and the thumbnail or single image view.

WildBit Viewer supports EXIF data and formats like the usual JPG, PNG, GIF, RAW and others but also Photoshop formats like PSD. The thumbnail viewer can be configured to show different sized thumbnails, sorted by name, size and date and any image meta data such as the aforementioned EXIF. There is also the image histogram and zoom via scrolling and geo information for viewing images using Google maps. Not forgetting animated GIF support and the ability to export image info to CSV files.

Via the Add Button button or by dragging folders to the ‘shell toolbar’ at the bottom of the interface favorite folders can be saved for future use. WildBit Viewer also has image compare – two images side by side – and slideshows with many transition effects. Images can be set as wallpaper and edited (Tools —> Editor) as well. The editing features include most of the usual in rotate, flip, adjust, transform, remove red eye, annotate (add text or shape), acquire (from scanner), filter (lens, morph, etc.) and some more.

Search is another noteworthy feature (see image below). Files within folders and optionally its subfolders can be searched by type (when Enable Filters is checked), name, location, date, size, attribute, EXIF, IPTC or XMP data. Note that the Filename text box must not be empty so use “*.*” (without the quotes) at least to start a search.

WildBit Viewer works on Windows 2000 and newer and is available in both portable and installer downloads. It is free for personal use. A pro version with multimedia support and a profile switcher is available as well.

December 6, 2011