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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Dealing with digital images, Part 2: Why you need a good viewer


Feb. 6, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   When you want to change something you wrote on a computer, you use a word processor. Think of that the next time you need to do something to an image that came from your scanner or your digital camera.
   What you need is an image processor. Programs that do that aren't called image processors, of course -- that would be too easy. They're called graphics editors, image editors or photo editors.
   But you also need an image viewer. If you deal with digital photos only now and then, you might even find that you don't need a separate image editor. The image viewers I'm recommending handle basic image editing, too.
   You need a good image viewer because you need a way to sort through and look at a lot of images in a short time. My wife and I came back from our Amazon River journey with 700 digital pictures. We could not have winnowed out the good ones from the not-so-good ones without an image viewer.
   And because one of the best image viewers for Windows costs nothing, you have no excuse for not having one even if you don't have a scanner and only work with digital photos now and then.
   I'll tell you about Windows image viewers this week and move on to Windows image editors next week. Later in this series I'll have tips on scanning files and on getting the best quality from your ink jet printer. I'll also tell you how to choose the right paper for your printer.
   The best image viewer for Windows is ACDSee, which you can download from http://www.acdsee.com. It is free to try out and costs only $50 to buy. (You can even try it out forever without paying for it. You'll get a nagging reminder now and then, but the software will continue to work. But pay for it and give a reward to the folks who program it.)
   ACDSee is the Rolling Stones of image viewers. It's been around a long time, surprises you now and then with its abilities and always has class.
   ACDSee will display practically any kind of image (even if it came from AOL or from a Macintosh), and it will show quickly thumbnail-size views of all the images in a folder. You can turn any image into Windows wallpaper and you can easily run a slide show of pictures.
   ACDSee is the fastest image viewer for Windows. Consider it an essential tool and don't fret over the price. (If you are really cheap, I'll tell The latest version of ACDSee also does basic image editing -- cropping areas, making the entire image larger or smaller, improving the color balance, that kind of thing -- and you can type descriptions of each image so you can find them and sort them by description.
   I've used ACDSee for years, starting out with the original version for Windows 3.1. That version is still available.
   But hold onto your hat -- and your credit card. If you don't want to pay any money for an image viewer, you can get one that's very close to ACDSee for free. It's called Irfan View, available from http://www.irfanview.com/english.htm.
   Irfan View is vastly ambitious, marvelously fast and amazingly easy to use. The fact that it's totally free is hard to believe. The author, Irfan Skiljan, will take donations if you really want to brighten his day, but the program is not distributed as shareware. It's freeware. You use it and enjoy it and feel good that somebody knows how to create good software without raking in the bucks.
   Irfan View has been around a long time and is practically bug-free. It's even able to show video clips if you don't like Microsoft's free media player.
   Irfan View can create thumbnails, too, and it will do slide shows. You can also show images one at a time against a plain background, and Irfan View will shrink or expand them to fit perfectly on the screen, too. These are the same functions ACDSee has.
   Like ACDSee, Irfan View also handles minor graphics editing. That means you can add both a graphics viewer and simple graphics editor to your computer without paying anything.
   Irfan View would rank at the top, surpassing even ACDSee, if it worked more intuitively. ACDSee seems to do everything right no matter what key you press. Although this is obviously not entirely true, ACDSee does give you that confidence because it works so competently. A few small changes and Irfan View could be in the same league. If you compare cost, of course, Irfan View is just plain too attractive to pass up.
   Although ACDSee and Irfan View can create thumbnail views, better thumbnail viewers are available in Thumbs Plus and Compupic, competing products that can be tried out for free. Thumbs Plus comes from http://www.cerious.com and costs $75. Compupic costs $40 and is available from http://www.photodex.com/. Mac versions are available for both programs, and a Compupic comes in Linux and Unix versions, too. The Linux version is free for personal use, despite the price tag on one of the Web pages.
   They both have the same approach. When you open a folder containing images, they turn the icons for each image into tiny versions of the actual pictures (thumbnail views, in other words).
   The thumbnails are stored separately so they don't have to be created again unless you add or change images. The next time you open that folder, the thumbnails appear instantly.
   Clicking on a thumbnail displays the image full-size, either in a window or all by itself against a dark background. The image can be edited at this time.
   Like ACDSee, Thumbs Plus and Compupic also do slide shows and will create background wallpaper. Both will also convert images from one format to another in single mode or batch mode (doing many at once).
   And they both do basic image cropping, editing and retouching. If you're wondering if that means you might not need a separate image editor, you're right. Try Thumbs Plus or Compupic and see what you think.
   I use both these programs -- Thumbs Plus under Windows and Compupic under Linux -- and I'd choose Compupic if I could use only one of them. When I edited the photos my wife and I took along the Amazon River, I used Compupic for most of the preliminary work. The results were stunning. (A photo essay on our Amazon trip will be posted on the Web soon.)
   ACDSee, Thumbs Plus and Compupic can automatically expand small images to fill the screen or make large images smaller so that you can see the entire picture. Be sure to take advantage of this feature if your photos seem too big for your screen.