Good Image Browser?

leSLIe

leSLIe

Fisting is Too Mainstream for Me
Joined
Oct 18, 2004
Messages
13,982
i currently have ACDSee v7 and i want to upgrade, does anybody know some other good image browser ?
 
Adobe Bridge works great, but im not sure if you can get it sperately as it usually comes with Photoshop
 
Zonker said:
Windows Picture and Fax Viewer = instant win. ;)
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Probably the single most god-awful piece of software that ships with Windows. I mean, seriously, the thing is slower than a salted snail caught in a spider web and crushed by molasses. Just try opening a 60 mega pixel image in it. God, it's so slow.
 
the thing is slower than a salted snail caught in a spider web and crushed by molasses.
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LOL !!

60 MP that´s a good camera !
 
Most people reference Megapixels as a camera reference. Most Photoshop artist and image creaters refer more to resolution or a scale of 2k, 4k etc. I haven't heard anyone reference megapixels to something that wasn't taken from a digital camera.
 
psychoace said:
Most people reference Megapixels as a camera reference. Most Photoshop artist and image creaters refer more to resolution or a scale of 2k, 4k etc. I haven't heard anyone reference megapixels to something that wasn't taken from a digital camera.
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"Megapixel" just means millions of pixels. The source has nothing to do with it.

But yeah, it was a 12k image for an A1 print.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Probably the single most god-awful piece of software that ships with Windows. I mean, seriously, the thing is slower than a salted snail caught in a spider web and crushed by molasses. Just try opening a 60 mega pixel image in it. God, it's so slow.
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QFT the default windows picture viewer is insanely slow when dealing when pictures larger than just a couple megapixels. Forget 60mp, it lags terribly with just a 6-10mp picture off my digital camera.

for windows I find that irfanview is quite nice. For unix I like the rather generically-named Image Viewer
 
The funny thing is, Preview running on my dinky lil' iBook loaded the 12k image just fine. It did take a while to load it, obviously, since it was a 275 megabyte image file and my hard drive was a slow 4200 RPM one. But once it was loaded, it was fine. On an iBook with a 1.33GHz CPU and a cheesy Radeon Mobility 9550 with 32 megs of VRAM. When the Windows image viewer on my Core 2 Fucking Duo at twice the clock frequency and a Geforce 7600GT was more or less unusable with it.

If that doesn't scream "unoptimized," I don't know what does.

Argh.
 
You are definetly pushing the extreme of the program though. It's a small program with a purpose of displaying pictures for the market they are selling towards. Most people I know don't have 12k images. If they did I am sure they would for sure not open it in some dinky program like Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Just like you wouldn't. Just like you wouldn't run Supreme Commander in your browser you would never open a 12k image in anything else other then a professional program.
 
But it gets horrendously slow even with relatively normal images. I mean, even cheap-o digital cameras are poking into 10 megapixel territory these days, and it's really slow even with that reasonably sized images.

And why wouldn't I use the built-in image preview tool? I just wanted to show the image to someone.
 
psychoace said:
Just like you wouldn't run Supreme Commander in your browser you would never open a 12k image in anything else other then a professional program.
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that is a completely invalid comparison. You would never run ANY game in a web browser because...well...web browsers aren't made to run games

You would, however, open pictures in a picture viewing program because, well, that's what the program was written to do.
 
I'm a fan of Picassa, but I think I'm going to switch over to iPhoto soon.
 
Eva_Unit_0 said:
that is a completely invalid comparison. You would never run ANY game in a web browser because...well...web browsers aren't made to run games

You would, however, open pictures in a picture viewing program because, well, that's what the program was written to do.
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You play flash games in your browser right? So your browser can be used to play games but you wouldn't want to play any high end games through it now would you?

Statement is valid and remember Picture and fax viewer was made 5 years ago when XP came out. It was when 4 megapixels were high end. So you have an app optimized for that. If Vista version of picture and fax can't handle 10 megapixel pictures than i would say it sucks. It's just Microsoft can't update every app to fit with the times otherwise the operating system would be well behind the times when it comes to other new technologies.
 
PicaView 2.0 is GREAT for viewing individual pics by right-clicking a pic, then going to its thumbnail in the right-click menu. It can also instantly convert files, make them your wallpaper, post to an online gallery, etc. Really great and fast/easy.
 
psychoace said:
You play flash games in your browser right? So your browser can be used to play games but you wouldn't want to play any high end games through it now would you?
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Okay, you show me a screenshot of F.E.A.R, or WoW, or Doom 3, or any other modern game in a web browser. Until then your arguement is invalid, because the reason that you wouldn't play high end games in your browser isn't that you don't want to, but that you physically cant

On the contrary, I most certainly can open a 12mp image in windows picture and fax viewer without breaking the universe.
 
psychoace said:
Statement is valid and remember Picture and fax viewer was made 5 years ago when XP came out. It was when 4 megapixels were high end. So you have an app optimized for that. If Vista version of picture and fax can't handle 10 megapixel pictures than i would say it sucks. It's just Microsoft can't update every app to fit with the times otherwise the operating system would be well behind the times when it comes to other new technologies.
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No, that's not how it works. You don't optimize an image viewer for a specific limit. It's not that the Picture & Fax viewer is really fast with 4 megapixel images and then gets slow. It's that it's a generally shitty and unoptimized application. The reason it's fine with 4 megapixel images, is because 4 megapixel isn't an awful lot of pixels, not because they optimized it for that particular size.

Because, quite frankly, it's way too fucking slow for 4 megapixel as well. We just don't notice as much, because hardware these days is really fast.
 
I am running a laptop at 1.5ghz (overclocked to 2ghz) with 512mb of ddr2 ram and a 40gig 5400 rpm hard drive. It seems to take less then 1 seconds to go from one picture to the next with the Picture and Fax viewer. Mind you these are 8 Megapixel images that are at about 3-6 mb each in Jpg. It does exactly what it was created for they can't make an app future proof thus the reason why there is always new versions of programs.
 
psychoace said:
I am running a laptop at 1.5ghz (overclocked to 2ghz) with 512mb of ddr2 ram and a 40gig 5400 rpm hard drive. It seems to take less then 1 seconds to go from one picture to the next with the Picture and Fax viewer. Mind you these are 8 Megapixel images that are at about 3-6 mb each in Jpg. It does exactly what it was created for they can't make an app future proof thus the reason why there is always new versions of programs.
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Compared to how switching back & forth between them in something like XNView is instant, as opposed to almost a second.

I stick by my "Picture & Fax Viewer is just a slow piece of shit" opinion.
 
So what image browser is both fast (between switching images) and supports lots of different formats (jpg, png, jp2, the adobe formats etc...)?
 
I use Vista's image viewer and when I was on XP i used the Picture and Fax viewer.

If you have a WD Raptor HDD the time between images switching is almost instant on XP and is instant on Vista.

That is with 10.2 MP images from 6mb to 10mb in size from a Nikon D200. Sorry I dont really have anything larger than that but I doubt many people do ;)
 
well i finally end up buying ACDSee 9 Photo Manager, works fine with Picaview !
 
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