tell me what viewer you use

[petiot111]

Hi all.

My first post on this particular forum. I would like to know what soft you are using to view your photo.

I am using irfan view. although it is great is lacks some essential features (e.g. view of exif is a painfull three clicks away for each photo)

what do you use? i am looking for something small, simple, effective, and which do not weight XXXMB on your drive! i got upset after i realised that ACDSee writes a db file that increase up to 250 meg !!! How can they justify this when irfan weight a mere 2 MB and display photos as fast ... anyway i

Thanks for your answers

Dan

[meow]

I use Irfan too. But I also have a new love. PhoA. It's more of an image cataloger than a viewer really but very different and extremely lightweight. It doesn't "store" images but builds virtual collections, has a great search feature and so on. Note, it does not support EXIF for TIFFs (yet).

What's great is that it's so easy to add the same images to many categories and it has made me look at my pictures a little differently.

An extra plus is that it uses relative paths to the big images. You can move a phoa file and associated images to a CD and it will work. You can mail them to someone togehter with the exe. You can send just the phoa file and the exe and people can see the thumbs (but of course not the large images).

Maybe not what you asked for but give it a spin. It's free. :p
http://www.dk-soft.org/phoa/

Oh, the author is working on CRW support. :D

[meow]

Oh, I should add that a phoa file I have here containing about 500 distinct thumbs is a little over 2 MB. The exe is about 3 MB. :shock:

[petiot]

Oh, I should add that a phoa file I have here containing about 500 distinct thumbs is a little over 2 MB. The exe is about 3 MB. :shock:

Hi Meow

I think we are on the same wavlength on what a good software should be! :)

I like it a lot, very good russian codding i think! I have to play with it, i think there is potential. too sad it does not support raw formats and tiff exif. It is also a bit tricky to create a create an album since you can t view the photo before it is in the album!! am i correct? :( (but one more time i might have missed something).

anyway, thanks for you excellent suggestion. For a first post in this forum, i am not desapointed! :)

Dan

[CyberDyneSystems]

It used to be easy..

I used ACDSee exclusively.. but currently the only thing I can find that will even SEE the MkII RAW files is BreezeBrowser...

I tried irfanview and it's a no go too.. for free it's a great ACDSee alternative.. but I still prefer ACDSEE by a large margin.

[meow]

You bet! Small and no bloat is the way to go. Glad you like it. :D

Yes, you can view a picture before you add it. In a way. When you do the add picture thing and see the list of images in a folder you can double-click an image and it opens in your default program (IrfanView, of course :P). If you right-click you get the usual explorer context menu.

I have a folder at the bottom of the tree (left pane). It contains subfolders named after date (same as I store pictures). I add all pictures to the shooting date folder as they are ready and then I sort them in other folders (categories) from there. Works.

If you chose one of the betas, also check out F4 -> Tools. You can add a bunch of external editors or whatever there.

[Vegas Poboy]

I use ACDSee exclusively also, for the quick overview. Then I have a workspace setup in CS that I use to flag the files I'm going to edit. I've tried using others but so I've been using ACDSee so long I could change over.

[CyberDyneSystems]

Tried Phoa.. for about 4 minutes.. it doesn't browse very well.. and it can not display any RAW formats.. so it's not for me..

BUT It does look like a GREAT peice of freeware for the majority of people that don't need RAW viewing. Irfanview is another such product that in fact does support many RAW files.

[Haifidelity]

BreezeBrowser...I used ACDSee for years, but I prefer BreezeBrowser over the current version of ACDSee (which is a resource hog). I definately like the "Show AF points" that Breezebrowser allows.

[petiot]

Hey thanks all. As i was suspected ACDSee is the mostly used. I really like it too, neat interfaces, very usefull functions, etc. But the developpers really think we are dumb to accept they hijack our PC's disk and memory. By principle, i can t resign myself to accept this!! ;).

Anyway thanks all

Dan

PS: Since some people might be tempted to try some viewers due to this post, i recommend this fantasticly usefull and slick software (tracks install and allow COMPLETE and TOTAL uninstal of software): www.geocities.com/ggmartau/tu.html

[Sgouz]

I like iPhoto, if it supported RAW formats it would be perfect.

-Steve