Best Free Image Viewer

You probably take a lot of pictures with your digital camera or your mobile, scan your old photographs into your machine for convenience, collect thousands of pics from the web and get just as many from your friends. Now before you can decide, what to do with them, you need some sort of organization with basic editing and file management functions. You are looking for a digital image viewer.

Digital image viewers are a very popular demand, and so we fortunately find an ample choice of free programs that need not be afraid of a comparison with their commercial rivals.

They all offer basically the same features

Browsing: much like in a file manager you browse your collection in the well known folder tree or a “Calendar View”, that is sorted by date
Viewing: “detailed”, thumbnails, full screen
Editing: you want to rename the files, move or delete your file
Resize & convert: change the file size and format
Apply effects: although this is already image editing, at least some basic effects and editing options are expected like colour adjustments, “red eye” correction, rotate, crop
Slide shows & “films”: create slide shows or even “films” from your pix
Publish: upload them to your favourite online service or blog
Batch processing: you want to do that with several files at once

Here's our choice of the best free image editors.

Picasa

The strength of Picasa is its picture management - it is an image organizer. The program scans your hard disk for pictures of the usual formats (BMP, GIF, PSD, PNG), organizes them in albums. You can extend this organization by adding tags to your pictures, but you also may simply be satisfied by the chronological order in year, month, and date - the calender view. The additional tree view - well known from your filemanager- allows you indeed to move those folders around from within Picasa.

The pictures (and graphics) can be edited, enhanced, cropped, resized, joined to a ‘film’, and yes, this includes music also as well as your holiday movies.

If you’re in sharing pics online you can do that easily and not only upload your complete collection to a Web Album, but also synchronize the changes you’ve made locally with your Web Album.

If you can live with the “downside” of this software – it is a Google! – then you may well have found your first tool for image editing.

Homepage
Download

http://picasa.google.com/
http://picasa.google.com/

System
Language

Windows, Linux
English, Deutsch

FastStone Image Viewer

As mentioned above and fully equipped. Intuite GUI, ready to start from scratch.

Reads the following image formats:
JPEG BMP GIF PNG TIFF PCX TGA JPEG2000 PSD WMF CUR ICO

and saves to:
JPEG BMP GIF PNG TIFF PCX TGA JPEG2000

Homepage
Download

http://www.faststone.org/index.htm
http://www.faststone.org/download.htm

System
Language

Windows
English, Deutsch

XnView

Import about 400 graphic file formats, Export about 50 graphic file formats, Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support - Image IPTC, EXIF metadata support - EXIF auto rotation support - IPTC editing - Resize, rotate, crop support - Lossless rotate & crop (jpeg) support - Adjust brightness, contrast... - Auto levels, contrast - Modify number of colors - Apply filters (blur, average, emboss, ...) - Apply effects (lens, wave, ...) - Fullscreen mode - Slide show with effects - Batch convert, batch rename - Create WEB page easily - Screen capture - Create contact Sheet - Create or edit Multi-page file (TIFF, DCX, LDF) - TWAIN & WIA support (Windows only) - Print support (Windows only) - Drag & Drop support (Windows only) - Compare image side by side - Filmstrip layout

Homepage
Download

http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html
http://www.xnview.com/en/download.html

System
Sprache

Windows, Linux
Deutsch, English

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best free image viewer

Last Updated ( Dienstag, 02 Februar 2010 )

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