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!

I use XnViewMP for image editing purposes. You can resize, crop, rotate, level and so on easily and quickly. Command line is pretty handy for me (I use it with XYPlorer script ability so I can batch modify images in XYplorer).
And if you need to search for similar images, I?think I tested all the tools I could and XnVIew MP is the most accurate with the ability to work with black and white images (very handy if you are a comics author).

My purpose was to quick view a folder with a few hundred thousands of images a thumbnail view.
XnView was the only program that suceeded to do it in Linux (Ubuntu) for me.
Compaare also Gwenview and gThumb.

I wanted an image management desktop app to tag all images and search by them later. This program has tags called 'categories'. They are useful until you move or rename an image. Then you have to fill its categories again. DigiKam tags by hashes and tags are permanent in it. Even after moving or renaming. I played with it for an hour, but then chose DigiKam.

It does what it does, image viewing. And it does really well. It opens most image format you can think of, even some niche ones. But the problem comes when it tried not to be image viewer. It wants to be a file browser too, and that part's experience lacks polish.

The critical downside is it's window's centric UI & UX. Going between OSX and Gnome based Linux, it's design could have gone through some face lift, and that leads to…

• Configuration is cluttered. But I believe a little cleanup could streamline the settings interface.

• Hotkeys by default uses classic windows key combination. Some keys are design to accommodate full size keyboard by default (Example would be Zooming in and out is + and - key from numpad instead - =). Which is inconvenient for Laptop and TKL users. And not all shortcuts are configurable, I have to think like using windows software instead of my Gnome configurations.

• Doesn't support multi viewer windows. Which is a bummer, when I work on design, I would like to view multiple images simultaneously.

• File browser is mandatory and it cannot be disabled. Browser Dark UI are full of bright gradient highlights and still uses bright folder icons etc. Could have spend little more attention on default theme color.

Potentially it could be number one best image viewer on the market, it's just hindered by the unpolished UI. It is stuck in early 2000 windows centric design. I would like to see it integrate better on other OSes, or even modern windows.

It's perfect - does exactly what I wanted it to do: efficiently view image files.

Fantastic for organizing image files, allowing you to (among other things) preview photoshop files, tag images in a very clean and clever way, convert images to a given format, and so much more. I haven't used the batch renamer yet, but I expect to soon. This software isn't something you need, but it does what it does so easilly and reasonably quickly that I think it's certainly worth having,