An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as color depth, display resolution, and color profile.
Although one may use a full-featured raster graphics editor (such as Photoshop or the GIMP or the StylePix) 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 organizers.
Some image viewers, such as Windows Photo Viewer that comes with Windows operating systems, change a JPEG image if it is rotated, resulting in loss of image quality; others offer lossless rotation.
Video Image viewer
Features
Typical features of image viewers are:
- basic viewing operations such as zooming and rotation
- fullscreen display
- slideshow
- thumbnail display
- printing
- screen capture
- photo editor(if installed)
Advanced features are:
- decode next image in advance and keep previous decoded image in memory for fast image changes
- display (and edit) metadata such as XMP, IPTC Information Interchange Model and Exif
- batch conversion (image format, image dimensions, etc.) and renaming
- create contact sheets
- create HTML thumbnail pages
- different transition effects for slideshows
Maps Image viewer
Common image viewers
Windows
- Windows Explorer - file manager with basic built-in functionality for image viewing
- Windows Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows XP
- ACDSee, FastPictureViewer, FastStone Image Viewer, Imagine, IrfanView, Media Pro 1, pViewer, XnView
- Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 7-10
UNIX-like
- Eye of GNOME, feh, Geeqie, Gwenview, GThumb, KuickShow, xloadimage, XnView, xv, fbida, fim
Mac
- Preview (Mac OS X), iFotosoft Photo Viewer
Web-based
- Imajize HTML5-based 360° Viewer
- AJAX-ZOOM Gallery AJAX-ZOOM Gallery
- NeptuneLabs FSI Viewer
- WebRotate 360 WebRotate 360 Product Viewer
- Magic Toolbox's Magic 360 Spin Viewer
- Magic Toolbox's Magic Zoom Plus Javascript Image Zoom
See also
- Comparison of image viewers
- Comparison of CAD, CAM and CAE file viewers
- Desktop organizer
- Image organizer
- Binary file#Viewing binary files
- Electronic document
- Media player
- Text editor
- Web browser
Source of the article : Wikipedia