JPEGView is a free, portable image viewer for the Windows operating system that is blazing fast and very feature-rich at the same time.
Many good, and not so good, free and commercial image viewers are available for the Windows operating system.
Windows ships for instance with the Windows Photo Viewer or the Photos app, ok, but not brilliant image viewers that get the job done but as usual, there are better alternatives out there.
Free alternatives include FastStone Image Viewer, XnView or Irfanview, commercial ones the excellent FastPictureViewer Professional.
JPEGView is a free Open source alternative. It can, despite its name open several image formats including JPEG, PNG, TIFF or Gif. The photo viewer sports a minimal design that hides most features under the surface. The program displays a file browser on startup to pick a single image or folder for viewing.
JPEGView
Most users may want to assign the supported image extensions to JPEG View so that a double-click on an image launches the image viewer directly. You can initiate the process with a right-click on the interface, and selecting Settings/Admin > Set as default viewer for a start. The rest depends on the version of Windows that you are running.
JPEG View displays the selected picture and a set of basic controls once an image has been loaded. The controls at the bottom disappear after some time, and offer standard functionality like rotating the image, loading the next or previous image, loading the first or last image of the folder, displaying EXIF information or switching to windowed or full screen mode.
Most features can be controlled with the keyboard directly as well, and it is usually faster once you have memorized the shortcuts. Good thing is that the program displays shortcuts automatically when you hover over buttons and other interface elements.
A right-click displays all available options, and boy, there are lots of them.
From batch renaming and copying images, to setting the modification date, displaying various image related information on screen, to enabling auto correction, local density correction, and viewing a slideshow of all images in a folder.
JPEGView supports slideshows, various sorting options that you can switch between, and even things like auto-correction.
The application loads the images fast. We tested the speed by loading four to five Megabyte images from a test folder and they displayed more or less instantly on our test system.
The only negative aspect is how the settings are changed. The program uses ini files for the settings, and the preferences are changed by editing the ini files manually. That is not the most user friendly way, and might keep inexperienced users away.
Advanced users on the other hand can tweak the image viewer to their liking, from changing the color saturation, sharpening or default color balance, to switching to a windowed startup mode, changing cpu cores usage and the quality of the down sampling filter.
Verdict
JPEG View is a very fast, and feature rich image viewer for the Windows operating system. The Open Source tool is completely portable, and available for download on the Sourceforge project website.