Image Viewers

I've tried out a bunch of image viewers for previewing my photography. None of them are perfect, but some of them are very good. I think the quality of image viewers is directly related the popularity of digital pornography.

 

Microsoft Viewer. This program is actually ok. It's the one you get by default when you double click a file or when you right click and pick preview. It's very fast. It doesn't understand the tag in jpgs that says "you need to rotate to view". They obviously know about this stupid problem because they added a rotate button. They only thing that is usually for is looking at your personal digital photos. But you never want to press that button because it doesn't remove the tag from the jpg, so when you view it in another viewer it auto rotates the already upright image and it's sideway again. This program doesn't go full screen, which after doing this for a while I've decided is the best way to preview photos. You really want to see as much detail as possible. You can zoom in on the photo, but the controls are awkward.

 

I still haven't found a viewer that has good controls for zooming. You need to do this to check focus. This is what I want:

• One button to zoom to 100%, centering the image
• One button to return to full screen
• When zoomed, I want to drag the Adobe way, with a hand cursor  (Scroll bars are too hard to use)

IrFan. This program is really popular and really good. I think it might win as my main viewer after I give a view more an honest try. The enter key toggles full screen mode which is perfect. You can set it up so that is shows f-stop information and the like, even in full screen. Ctrl-H will zoom to 100%, but it centers on the top left. It render really quickly, but it doesn't cache the next few image. So you look at black for like 300 milliseconds when you switch between photo sized jpgs. Even the built in Microsoft Viewer caches the next image. If you press F8 then 1 it will copy the image.

 

I think that I'm going to copy the images that are good. The ones that are like 1 in 10 in quality. A lot of viewer have rating systems, but I'm worried that it will tie me to a viewer and then I can't switch because I lose the culling. It's also nice to have a directory of good images to view quickly that is separate from all the unculled images.

 

Picasa. Wow this program has a lot of UI. Hopefully it will get Googlified and lose all the annoy UI now that they are owned by Google. This program has a lot going for it. It's the faster viewer. It views all images instantly. It isn't really directory based, so by default it shows you all your recent images. It's got a number of really bad problems. First of all, get rid of the velocity based scroll bars. Why does everybody reinvent these things? It's like what a geek would come up with if he had do make a UI. They suck. They are pretty much the less efficient most annoying way of scrolling. Picasa has a full screen mode, they call it "slide show". It's ok but doesn't have a zoom. It has a labeling mechanism, but I'm not sure where that data is stored so I don't use it. It has a special label that is called "starred" which is nice just like gmail. That's nice, but I'd rather an easy copy method.

 

Photoshop CS. They added a lot of features to the file browser that almost make it an image viewer. It doesn't really go full screen and it's way too slow.

 

ACDSee. We had this at work and the license manager made it too slow to boot so I got a bad impression from it. Recently I've been trying the demo at home at it seems pretty good. It's fast, except when viewing raw camera files. I think I want the JPG in the made directory and the raw files hidden in a raw directory. This way they never show up in a viewer, but I can get them if I do advanced images processing. It has an easy to use copy command which is nice. It's got a rating system, but it's in a proprietary database. It's $50, so it's not free like all the others. Assuming that you purchased Photoshop for other reasons. But it has a good image importer that I might end up using too.