Home Phone and Internet $60/mo
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Fast, friendly and easy, but UI layout (panes) not customizable
Pros: Despite the small 5MB footprint, this is a feature-rich image and video browser with lightning fast panning and zooming of images. A wealth of settings are thoughtfully provided so you can disable things like the thumbnail database, control deletion behavior (recycle bin or not, confirmation or not), include videos in the file list without generating previews (slow), or enable high-quality scaling of images. The settings are organized and described well, so they are not overwhelming like in some other viewers. Included are contact sheets, lossless rotations and the ability to strip metadata (such as EXIF properties) out of JPEG files. Especially nice is the Compare function which smoothly scrolls 2 or more images in sync, side-by-side for easy comparison.
Cons: The 3-pane layout is commonly seen in programs like this, but some allow you to re-arrange the panes. This one does not. You are stuck with folders in the upper left, preview in the lower left, and file list on the right.
Also, regardless of any setting, when you select a folder, this viewer preloads a preview of every image. If the thumbnail database is enabled and the folder was previously processed, then the previews are loaded from the database fairly quickly, else the previews are generated at this time which can take a moment. Either way, the previews for the entire folder are stored IN MEMORY. It is never a good idea to keep 5000+ images in a single folder, but many viewers would deal with it better than this one. Most perplexing is the high CPU and delay when opening the Batch Convert/Rename tool on a large folder EVEN AFTER the previews were already loaded in memory. Switching from thumbnail view to small icons should be much faster than going the opposite direction, but strangely, that is not the case.
Posted: 03-Feb-2008 12:15:44 PM
