JPEGView, Fast Windows Image Viewer
JPEGView is a free, portable image viewer for the Windows operating system that is blazing fast and very feature-rich at the same time.
Many good, and not so good, free and commercial image viewers are available for the Windows operating system.
Windows ships for instance with the Windows Photo Viewer or the Photos app, ok, but not brilliant image viewers that get the job done but as usual, there are better alternatives out there.
Free alternatives include FastStone Image Viewer, XnView or Irfanview, commercial ones the excellent FastPictureViewer Professional.
JPEGView 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 minimal 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.
JPEGView
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. You can initiate the process with a right-click on the interface, and selecting Settings/Admin > Set as default viewer for a start. The rest depends on the version of Windows that you are running.
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.
Most features can be controlled with the keyboard directly as well, and it is usually faster once you have memorized the shortcuts. Good thing is that the program displays shortcuts automatically when you hover over buttons and other interface elements.
A right-click displays all available options, and boy, there are lots of them.
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.
JPEGView supports slideshows, various sorting options that you can switch between, and even things like auto-correction.
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.
Verdict
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 on the Sourceforge project website.
I really like JPEGView, just discovered actually! I like that the GPS coordinates can be shown while browsing in the picture info panel (F2) and then I just click on the coordinates and it opens a map link in browser to show where the geotag is located. There are only a few free image viewers that have this as quickly accessible as JPEGView. HoneyView and nomacs viewers also have this function in one click from browsing a photo. IrfanView can open Google Earth with the location from the photo by keyboard shortcut Ctrl-O however to open a map link in IrfanView the process is more cumbersome, on keyboard i>e>m and then you have to close two windows to get back to photo browsing. There are some configuration quirks with JPEGView but once I got them sorted out, it’s been quick slick.
it is fast
and horrible at using other color spaces than rgb
also there is no option for respecting windows explorer sorting
so depending on your needs it either great little program or waste of time
so ’bout color spaces, well my bad..
you have to enable it in INI settings: UseEmbeddedColorProfiles=true
” However this will be disabled by default because it forces to use GDI+ to read JPEG images. This has several disadvantages:
– It is considerably slower
– It cannot read some valid JPEGs (blame Microsoft for that)”
mentioned slowdown isn’t really that bad, barely noticeable
Nice program, except I wish it has more supported formats. Nice open source option, wish there were more for windows.
I have a very nice program. I tried it at my friend’s lap. but I can’t try it at home as it is working on old versions of windows and I work with windows 7 the latest version. I tried ( Image Viewer ) program that is easy, fast and opens a lot of image formats. I found it on site: AUDIO-VIDEO.WS
it is a good program but it it opens a little formats of pictures. i try ( image viewer ) program that is easy and powerful and opens all formats of pictures. i found it on site : ( Softwareclub.ws )
does it support animated gifs?
Smitg, no it does not support animated gifs, only displays the first frame.
IrfanView is absolutely the best in my opinion!