Comparison of image viewers

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This article presents a comparison of image viewers and image organizers which can be used for image viewing.

Contents

Functionality overview and licensing

Supported file formats

Commonly used vendor-independent formats

Camera raw formats

Supported operating systems

Basic features

Additional features

See also

Notes

Related Research Articles

A file viewer is a utility application software on operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, or Windows. The file viewer is responsible for user access of files located on a data storage device. File viewers allow the user to open and view content on a device, such as a Personal Computer (PC) or a mobile phone.

iMovie Video editing software developed by Apple

iMovie is a free video editing application made by Apple for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. It includes a range of video effects and tools like color correction and image stabilization, but is designed to be accessible to users with little or no video editing experience. iMovie's professional equivalent is Apple's Final Cut Pro X.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Picasa</span> Image organizer and image viewer (2002–2016)

Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape in 2002. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the word casa and "pic" for pictures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IrfanView</span> Image viewer, editor and converter program

IrfanView is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter program for Microsoft Windows. It can also play video and audio files, and has some image creation and painting capabilities. IrfanView is free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires paid registration. It is noted for its small size, speed, ease of use, and ability to handle a wide variety of graphic file formats. It was first released in 1996.

A container format or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Notable examples of container formats include archive files and formats used for multimedia playback. Among the earliest cross-platform container formats were Distinguished Encoding Rules and the 1985 Interchange File Format.

Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability.

The Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is an ISO standard, originally created by Adobe Systems Inc., for the creation, processing and interchange of standardized and custom metadata for digital documents and data sets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XnView</span> Software for reading, viewing, and processing images

XnView is an image organizer and general-purpose file manager used for viewing, converting, organizing and editing raster images, as well as general purpose file management. It comes with built-in hex inspection, batch renaming, image scanning and screen capture tools. It is licensed as freeware for private, educational and non-profit uses. For other uses, it is licensed as commercial software.

A camera raw image file contains unprocessed or minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, a motion picture film scanner, or other image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed, and contain large amounts of potentially redundant data. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter, in a wide-gamut internal color space where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a viewable file format such as JPEG or PNG for storage, printing, or further manipulation. There are dozens of raw formats in use by different manufacturers of digital image capture equipment.

Α video codec is software or a device that provides encoding and decoding for digital video, and which may or may not include the use of video compression and/or decompression. Most codecs are typically implementations of video coding formats.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastStone Image Viewer</span> Image viewer software for Windows

FastStone Image Viewer is an image viewer and organizer software for Microsoft Windows, provided free of charge for personal and educational use. The program also includes basic image editing tools, like cropping, color adjustment and red-eye removal.

Windows Imaging Component (WIC) is a COM-based imaging codec framework introduced in Windows Vista (and later available in Windows XP Service Pack 3) for working with and processing digital images and image metadata.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FastPictureViewer</span> Freemium image viewer for Windows

FastPictureViewer is a freemium image viewer for Windows XP and later. Its aim is to facilitate quick review, rating and annotation of large quantities of digital images in the early steps of the digital workflow, with an emphasis on simplicity and speed. As an app with a freemium license, a basic version is available cost-free for personal, non-profit or educational uses, while a commercial license is required for the professional version with additional features. The basic version starts as a full version trial.

Rawzor is a proprietary lossless image compression software which compresses camera raw images without any loss in image quality or meta-information. It is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PhotoLine</span> Raster and vector graphics editor

PhotoLine is a general purpose bitmap and vector graphics editor developed and published by Computerinsel GmbH for Windows, macOS, and Linux/Wine. It was originally created in 1995 by Gerhard Huber and Martin Huber. The program combines bitmap and vector graphics editing in one seamless working application unlike most graphics software which tend to focus on either bitmap or vector editing and output. PhotoLine is considered as a market competitor to Adobe Photoshop.

WebP is a raster graphics file format developed by Google intended as a replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF file formats. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, as well as animation and alpha transparency.

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a digital container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video.

Grok is a computer software library to encode and decode images in the JPEG 2000 format. It is designed for stability, high performance, and low memory usage. Grok is free and open-source software released under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3.

JPEG XL is a royalty-free open standard for the compressed representation of raster graphics images. It defines a graphics file format and the abstract device for coding JPEG XL bitstreams. It is developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the international standard ISO/IEC 18181. As a superset of JPEG/JFIF encoding, it features a compression mode built on a traditional block-based transform coding core. Additionally, there is a "modular mode" for synthetic image content and lossless compression. Optional lossy quantization enables both lossless and lossy compression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AVIF</span> Raster graphics file format

AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF container format. It competes with HEIC, which uses the same container format built upon ISOBMFF, but HEVC for compression. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019. Version 1.1.0 was finalized in April 2022.

References

  1. "[Windows] Best free image viewer — IrfanView vs XnView vs FastStone vs Picasa vs Zoner | dotTech". October 8, 2013.
  2. "Supported formats". XnView.com.