Although one may use a full-featured raster graphics editor (such as Photoshop or GIMP) as an image viewer, these have many editing functionalities which are not needed for just viewing images, and therefore usually start rather slowly. Also, most viewers have functionalities that editors usually lack, such as stepping through all the images in a directory (possibly as a slideshow).
Image viewers give maximal flexibility to the user by providing a direct view of the directory structure available on a hard disk. Most image viewers do not provide any kind of automatic organization of pictures and therefore the burden remains on the user to create and maintain their folder structure (using tag- or folder-based methods). However, some image viewers also have features for organizing images, especially an image database, and hence can also be used as image organizer.
Some image viewers, such as Windows Photo Viewer that come with Windows operating systems, change a JPEG image if it is rotated, resulting in loss of image quality; others offer lossless rotation.
Features
Typical features of image viewers are:
basic viewing operations such as zooming and rotation
A file viewer is a software application that represents the data stored in a computer file in a human-readable form. The file contents are formatted in a meaningful way, then displayed on the screen, printed out, or read aloud using speech synthesis.
CodedColor is a bitmap graphics editor and image organizer for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, and is published by 1STEIN.
Paint is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens, modifies and saves image files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. For its simplicity and wide availability, it rapidly became one of the most used Windows applications, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time.
In computing, an icon is a pictogram or ideogram displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate a computer system. The icon itself is a quickly comprehensible symbol of a software tool, function, or a data file, accessible on the system and is more like a traffic sign than a detailed illustration of the actual entity it represents. It can serve as an electronic hyperlink or file shortcut to access the program or data. The user can activate an icon using a mouse, pointer, finger, or voice commands. Their placement on the screen, also in relation to other icons, may provide further information to the user about their usage. In activating an icon, the user can move directly into and out of the identified function without knowing anything further about the location or requirements of the file or code.
File Explorer, previously known and still sometimes called Windows Explorer, is a file manager application and default desktop environment that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. It is also the component of the operating system that presents many user interface items on the screen such as the taskbar and desktop. Controlling the computer is possible without File Explorer running. After the name change that was introduced in Windows 8, Windows Explorer name can still be seen when you look for it in the Windows Task Manager.
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.
A wallpaper or background is a digital image used as a decorative background of a graphical user interface on the screen of a computer, smartphone or other electronic device. On a computer, wallpapers are generally used on the desktop, while on a mobile phone they serve as the background for the home screen. Though most devices include a default background image, modern devices usually allow users to manually change the background image.
Microsoft Office Picture Manager is a raster graphics editor introduced in Microsoft Office 2003 and included up to Office 2010. It is the replacement to Microsoft Photo Editor introduced in Office 97 and included up to Office XP.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of notable file managers.
Geeqie is a free software image viewer and image organiser program for Unix-like operating systems, which includes Linux-based systems and Apple's OS X. It was first released in March 2010, having been created as a fork of GQview, which appeared to have ceased development. It uses the GTK toolkit. In September 2015, development was moved from SourceForge to GitHub.
ACDSee is an image organizer, viewer, and image editor program for Windows, macOS and iOS, developed by ACD Systems International Inc. ACDSee was originally distributed as a 16-bit application for Windows 3.0 and later supplanted by a 32-bit version for Windows 95. ACDSee Pro 6 adds native 64-bit support. The newest versions of ACDSee incorporate modern Digital Asset Management tools like Face Detection & Facial Recognition.
On Microsoft Windows operating systems, starting with the Internet Explorer 4 Active Desktop Update for Windows 95 to 98, a thumbnail cache is used to store thumbnail images for Windows Explorer's thumbnail view. This speeds up the display of images as these smaller images do not need to be recalculated every time the user views the folder.
Compared with previous versions of Microsoft Windows, features new to Windows Vista are very numerous, covering most aspects of the operating system, including additional management features, new aspects of security and safety, new I/O technologies, new networking features, and new technical features. Windows Vista also removed some others.
An image organizer or image management application is application software for organising digital images. It is a kind of desktop organizer software application.
FastStone Image Viewer is an image viewer and organizer for Microsoft Windows, provided free of charge for personal and educational use, as of version 7.0. The program also includes basic image editing tools.
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.
Some of the new features included in Windows 7 are advancements in touch, speech and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, support for additional file formats, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.
Double Commander is a free and open-source multi-platform two-panel orthodox file manager that is inspired by the Microsoft Windows-only Total Commander.
PMView is a raster graphics image viewer, converter, and organizer with basic image editing capabilities. It was originally developed for OS/2 but is also available for Microsoft Windows.
Photos is an image viewer and image organizer developed by Microsoft. It was first included in Windows 8 as a functional replacement for Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Photo Gallery.
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