Pineapple Pictures is a cross-platform and open source image viewer

Ashwin
Dec 12, 2020
Updated • Dec 15, 2020
Software, Windows software
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Pineapple Pictures is a cross-platform, open source image viewer. Pineapple Pictures has an opaque interface, which is kind of cool. It may look like there are no visual elements in the GUI, but when you mouse over it a toolbar appears at the bottom of the window. The GUI doesn't have a title bar, scrollbar, status bar, etc. and this minimalist approach is quite refreshing,

Pineapple Pictures is a cross-platform and open source image viewer

Drag and drop an image onto the program to view it. Pineapple Pictures is a QT based application and hence supports many popular image formats including JPG, BMP, PNG, WebP, GIF, animated GIFs, and many others.

Pineapple Pictures icons

When you load an image two arrow buttons appear on the screen, one on either side of the picture. Click on the buttons to jump to the next or previous image in the same directory.

Pineapple Pictures transparent background

The 1:1 button on the toolbar enables you to view an image in its original size. If it looks a little awkward, switch to the maximized view by clicking on the 2nd toolbar icon. Zoom In and out using the mouse wheel, or with the help of the toolbar icons. If you are not a fan of the transparent background, click on 2nd button from the right, to toggle a checkerboard background to reduce the opacity. Rotate the image using the icon in the far right corner of the toolbar.

Pineapple Pictures checkerboard background

Right-click anywhere in Pineapple Pictures' interface to bring up its context menu. The copy sub-menu has 2 options, using which you can copy the image's PixMap to the clipboard. The other option sends the current image's path to the clipboard.

Pineapple Pictures context menu

Want to browse your photo library while using other applications? Enable the "Stay on top" mode in Pineapple Pictures. Toggling protected mode prevents the program's window from being closed.

Click on the configure menu item to open the program's settings. Pineapple Pictures has just 2 options, one that disables the "stay on top" mode when you start the program. The other option lets you set the default double-click behavior, which can be used to close the program, switch to maximized view, or do nothing.

The properties menu displays the image's metadata such as the dimensions (resolution in pixels), aspect ratio, file name, type, path, size, date created and date modified. The text content in the property window is selectable, and you can use Ctrl + C to copy the data to the clipboard.

Pineapple Pictures properties

The image viewer used about 25MB of memory for the most part when browsing 1080p photos. The only time I saw the memory jump above 30MB was when I tested it with some very large images which I had, including some 8000 x 8000 files (30 MB images) in which case it used about 200MB, but that was to be expected.

Pineapple Pictures is an open source application written in QT5. The program is portable, and available for Windows and Linux.

Note: Windows will warn you whether you want to use the program, you can allow it. I scanned it using VirusTotal and it is squeaky clean.

If you want to browse your photo gallery without using too many system resources, this program can be a handy tool. But, Pineapple Pictures is a pretty basic image viewer, it lacks a slideshow setting, and it also doesn't remember the last accessed files or folders. Personally, the thing that annoyed me the most is the lack of support for keyboard shortcuts.

If you prefer image viewers with more options and functions, check out alternatives such as XnView, HoneyView, IrfanView, or the commercial Fast Picture Viewer.

Summary
software image
Author Rating
1star1star1stargraygray
4 based on 6 votes
Software Name
Pineapple Pictures
Operating System
Windows
Software Category
Multimedia
Price
Free
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Comments

  1. Julia said on December 13, 2020 at 7:54 am
    Reply

    Please note that just because VirusTotal reports zero findings for a file, it does not mean the file is ‘squeaky clean’.

    It just means that the file did not match any KNOWN malware signatures or heuristics. Nothing more.

    No offense intended, but I’m getting tired of people who pretend to be knowledgeable claiming that something is malware-free just because VirusTotal did not find anything.

    That said, this app is open source, so you can read the code and then compile it yourself.

  2. ULBoom said on December 13, 2020 at 4:43 am
    Reply

    So many of these…

    Faststone remains our favorite.

  3. Jim Vanderbilt said on December 12, 2020 at 7:11 pm
    Reply

    I use XnView MP to watch (lots of) photos. Which is to heavy for taking an occasional look at a couple of images, so I did use Windows photo viewer for it – until five minutes ago ;->
    Another really nice tool, thanks for the review.

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