Windows 10 - Best Photo Viewer?

I have recently purchased a new PC and "upgraded" to windows 10 after my old machine began to struggle running Lightroom and Photoshop.

Using Lightroom for the first time on the new machine tonight, I noticed that there was a huge difference is sharpness between my developed RAW files in lightroom and my exported JPEG viewed through the Photos App in windows 10. The JPEGs were often very blurry in the Photos App. When I exported several copies of the same photo at 100% file size with very different sharpening settings applied, they often look identical when viewed in the Photos App - lacking sharpness and not reflecting the changes makes in LR. I've looked online, and see that the Photos App in Win 10 seems to have a major flaw that causes pictures to often not render sharply - making it totally useless as a viewer for checking the quality of JPEGs and comparing them.

I am wondering what windows 10 software others use to display and check their exported JPEGs? All I want, is a simple picture viewer than quickly and accurately displays photos resized to fit full height and or width of the screen, preferably with buttons to quickly and easily move on to the next/previous photo in the folder (to allow easy comparison between different versions of the same photo). I would like a viewer that shows them with dark background preferably, but this is not essential. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

On my old HP windows 7 machine I used a simple program called HP Photo Viewer - which did the job absolutely perfectly, but sadly doesn't seem to work in windows 10.

FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER is excellent.

ukfalc wrote in post #18397468
I have recently purchased a new PC and "upgraded" to windows 10 after my old machine began to struggle running Lightroom and Photoshop.

Using Lightroom for the first time on the new machine tonight, I noticed that there was a huge difference is sharpness between my developed RAW files in lightroom and my exported JPEG viewed through the Photos App in windows 10. The JPEGs were often very blurry in the Photos App. When I exported several copies of the same photo at 100% file size with very different sharpening settings applied, they often look identical when viewed in the Photos App - lacking sharpness and not reflecting the changes makes in LR. I've looked online, and see that the Photos App in Win 10 seems to have a major flaw that causes pictures to often not render sharply - making it totally useless as a viewer for checking the quality of JPEGs and comparing them.

I am wondering what windows 10 software others use to display and check their exported JPEGs? All I want, is a simple picture viewer than quickly and accurately displays photos resized to fit full height and or width of the screen, preferably with buttons to quickly and easily move on to the next/previous photo in the folder (to allow easy comparison between different versions of the same photo). I would like a viewer that shows them with dark background preferably, but this is not essential. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

On my old HP windows 7 machine I used a simple program called HP Photo Viewer - which did the job absolutely perfectly, but sadly doesn't seem to work in windows 10.

Lightroom.

+1 for FastStone Image Viewer !

In Full Screen view, jab the cursor into each monitor border for a quick overview of features.

As a Lightroom user I don't actually keep JPEG files around on my PC, I just use LR to view the RAW images locally. Since you are using Adobe products anyway you know that you got Bridge with PS, and now you can install and run Bridge CC simply by creating a free Adobe account, if you don't have one already.

Bridge is a very good image orientated file manager program, and if you export the .xmp files from LR you can see all of your LR edits in Bridge. Simply hitting the spacebar gives you a full screen view, on black and scrolling the mouse wheel zooms in/out, the arrow keys move you to next/last image in that situation. If I need to export an image, and want to check it before I send it to wherever it's going I just use Bridge. Once the JPEG file is sent to it's final destination it is deleted from my local drive.

The only thing with Bridge with LR is that Bridge can only see the master version of any image, it can't see LR Virtual Copies. It's not like it would be very difficult to implement VC's with Bridge, you would simply need a second .xmp file, with the copy name appended to the xmp's filename.

Alan

rrblint wrote in post #18397555
FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER is excellent.

+1 ... many helpful features.

Another +1 ... it has a lot of capability, plus you can import other software for "All folder" actions. Works for me.

Faststone

Yeah, FastStone!

Thanks UKFALK for asking the question. I am not happy with the image viewers that came with my Windows 10 laptop. I have just downloaded Faststone and had a quick look. It is fast and clear and I will be using it from now on. Thanks guys for sharing.

Note that you can use the picture viewer that shipped with Windows 7, the default one, by applying the following registry values to Windows 10.

Create a blank text file and add paste the following text into it. Change the text file's extension to be .REG, then double click the file. The next time you attempt to open a jpg file, you'll have the option to set the viewer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.jpg]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.jpeg]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.gif]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.png]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.bmp]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.tiff]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.ico]

@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"

Another vote for Faststone. Here's a recent thread with plenty more recommendations for it.

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1482829

pcunite wrote in post #18401848
Note that you can use the picture viewer that shipped with Windows 7, the default one, by applying the following registry values to Windows 10.

Create a blank text file and add paste the following text into it. Change the text file's extension to be .REG, then double click the file. The next time you attempt to open a jpg file, you'll have the option to set the viewer.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.jpg]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.jpeg]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.gif]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.png]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.bmp]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.tiff]
@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"


; Change Extension's File Type
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sof​tware\Classes\.ico]

@="PhotoViewer.FileAss​oc.Tiff"

I don't see why you would want to do this though. Since one of the recent Win 10 updates, I'm not sure which one mind as I don't normally use it, Photos the Win 10 default viewer has at least been colour managed. AFAIK this is the first time that a Windows default image viewing program has actually been colour managed. It still doesn't make it an image viewer that I would want to use. Even before they updated Photos to be colour managed I did still think that it was marginally better than the next best, which probably was the Win 7 viewer.

Alan