The free XnView Picture Viewer is not just a fast picture viewer. It supports more than 500 image formats and also comes with a great number of functions to modify your images and could therefore just as well be called a picture editor. Once done with editing, you can save your images into one of the more than 70 output formats.
The thumbnail view is very convenient when you are browsing a large number of images but there is also a bunch of other options available: Thumbnail View, FullScreen View, FilmStrip View, SlideShow with FX, Images Compare, etc.
For editing you can use the following options: Resize, Rotate, Crop, Lossless Rotate & Crop (jpeg), Adjust Brightness/Contrast/etc., Auto Levels/Auto Contrast, Modify Colors depth & palette, Apply filters & Effects. Batch processing or batch renaming is available as well. This is of course very convenient if you need to process a large number of pictures.
One thing we love about this tool is that when you open an image in XnView and then save it, the result is an image in JPG format which is usually smaller (regarding memory, not dimensions) than the original. Really, no other operation needs to be performed. Just open the picture in XnView and save it. I often use this feature to create optimized images for my webpages.
Additional Features
And in addition to converting your images into over 70 formats, the tool can also create SlideShows, Web Pages, Contact Sheets, Video Thumbnails Galleries, File Listings, and Strips of Images. So, in a limited way, you can even create presentations with this tool (but don’t expect too much).
XnView also provides a convenient Screen Capture module and Windows™ TWAIN & WIA interface to capture images.
Oh, a neat little feature we should not forget is that you can set an image as wallpaper on your computer from right within XnView.
And should you really need a more powerful picture and photo editor, we recommend you look at Paint.NET.
And like the VLC Media Player we covered in the previous post, XnView comes without ads. And, of course, there is no adware or spyware either.
Available for: Windows
