JPEG View is a free Open source alternative. It can, despite its name open several image formats including JPEG, PNG, TIFF or Gif. The photo viewer sports a minimalistic design that hides most features under the surface. The program displays a file browser on startup to pick a single image or folder for viewing.

Most users may want to assign the supported image extensions to JPEG View so that a double-click on an image launches the image viewer directly. The portable software has no options to associated the file extensions with the program automatically, which means users have to make use of Windows to associated the file extensions with the program.

jpeg view

JPEG View displays the selected picture and a set of basic controls once an image has been loaded. The controls at the bottom disappear after some time, and offer standard functionality like rotating the image, loading the next or previous image, loading the first or last image of the folder, displaying EXIF information or switching to windowed or full screen mode.

A right-click displays all available options, and boy, there are lots of them.

image viewer

From batch renaming and copying images, to setting the modification date, displaying various image related information on screen, to enabling auto correction, local density correction, and viewing a slideshow of all images in a folder.

The application loads the images fast. We tested the speed by loading four to five Megabyte images from a test folder and they displayed more or less instantly on our test system.

The only negative aspect is how the settings are changed. The program uses ini files for the settings, and the preferences are changed by editing the ini files manually. That is not the most user friendly way, and might keep inexperienced users away.

Advanced users on the other hand can tweak the image viewer to their liking, from changing the color saturation, sharpening or default color balance, to switching to a windowed startup mode, changing cpu cores usage and the quality of the down sampling filter.

JPEG View is a very fast, and feature rich image viewer for the Windows operating system. The Open Source tool is completely portable, and available for download at the Sourceforge project website.

There was virtually no delay when viewing those images which I have always experienced before. Each image viewer that I tried had a small delay when displaying those large 4 Megabyte+ images.

Startup is very quick as well. Fast Picture Viewer comes with a slick design and runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and most likely Windows Server 2008 as well.

While designed with speed in mind Fast Picture Viewer has several additional interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of image viewers. The basics first. Users can integrate the software program in the shell, make it the default image viewer for file types and load files directly from within the interface.

The mouse wheel scrolls the images of the directory forward or backward and a click zooms into the image. Several keyboard shortcuts are available for mouse-less navigation. It has a Keep / Copy Folder function that provides a great method of copying selected images to that folder with just the keyboard.

The software program supports both Adobe XMP and Windows Vista metadata creation and update which fuels a rating feature where users can rate images on the fly.

The only thing that might keep someone from using Fast Picture Viewer is its lack of support of image formats. The free for personal use edition supports the JPEG format (*.jpeg, *.jpg, *.jpe, *.jfif, *.exif) and Microsoft HD Photo (*.hdp, *.wdp) / JPEG-XR while the professional version adds support for other common file types like png, tiff, bmp and RAW format previewing and is sold for $29.99 which is a reasonable price for such a fast software.

Another point of criticism could be that it concentrates solely on image viewing and that it does not offer image organizing or editing features. I do not need and miss those features on the other hand but some users might.