XnView MP

I've been using XnView as my main image viewer for many years, and XnViewMP by the same creators is to be its replacement and gets the main focus of development. The big new feature is that while XnView was a Windows-only application, XnViewMP also comes in versions for Linux and MacOS X ("MP" stands for multi-platform).

For several years, I kept XnView installed in parallel (which works without problem), as XnViewMP is a complete rewrite, and as such only gradually started reintroducing features I had gotten used to. As of the current versions, however (as of this writing, version 0.84 has been released), XnViewMP has really come of age and is a very complete, comfortable, and mostly stable image viewer and manager.

The manager portion is focussed around a file system browser with thumbnail view, and it offers many options to search, filter and categorise images. All the important metadata standards are supported, XnViewMP supports EXIF (read-only) and IPCT-IIM/XMP tags, so your applied edits work fine in other applications, as well. The program uses its own thumbnail catalog, so previews are cached and load quickly.

Many very useful management tools are available. For example, you can look for duplicate pictures, not just by finding exact copies of files but optionally also using a visual similarity metric, which for example can be useful to find slightly edited or cropped versions of a picture. XnViewMP has a powerful export feature to convert images to various formats, letting users choose many settings manually, supports direct uploading to FTP servers and some image hosting services, generating file lists, mosaics, multi-frame images, or capturing images from the screen or a website.

Of course there is a full-featured image viewer, with slideshow functionality. And it's one of the fastest viewers I've ever used! The only other viewer that I can think of which is in the same league, would be IrfanView. XnViewMP lets you quickly flip through images in a folder or a selection, zoom and rotate, and even display alpha channels, helpful grids, and histograms. If you need to crop pictures or copy content to other applications, there are tools to fix the size or aspect ratio of the selection rectangle. This is one of the few areas where XnView's options are still superior, but it's still very helpful and appreciated.

A pretty nice set of editing tools is available as well. From the standards of cropping, rotating, scaling, mirroring etc. to basic colour corrections and manipulations (contrast, brightness, gamma, saturation etc.) to a few basic (blur, sharpness, denoise) and artistic (sepia, vignette) filters. There's red-eye correction, and even some basic drawing tools to, for instance, put annotations or censor parts of an image. Although I haven't used it, it's even supposed to support Photoshop plug-ins.

Easily one of the most powerful features is the batch processing dialog. Make any selection of images, and go through the three steps of configuration: Input lets you add and remove images and entire folders, and set filters to decide which images your modifications will apply to; Processing allows you to set up a chain of editing steps from a selection of over 80 processing options, each with various parameters to set up; and Output decides where and in what format the resulting images should be saved – anything from overwriting the originals, to setting up automatic folders and file names while converting to different formats and stripping certain metadata.

As an image viewer, XnViewMP is right up there with IrfanView at the top of its class. As a picture manager, it is powerful, customizable, and fast. And as a basic editor with powerful batch processing, in many cases it is the only post-processing software I need for my photos, from actual corrections and edits right up to exporting them for upload. And maybe best of all, it's a true PC desktop software, with a powerful preferences dialog that lets you customise and adopt to your own way of working. None of that dumbed-down touchscreen nonsense here, you are in control. I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a try!