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I got into the habit of pressing Cmd-W to close the full-screen image. That keeps ACDSee running in the background, ready to show another image full-screen instantly.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

OS X has a good full-screen image viewer in ACDSee 1.6


Dec. 22, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   Regular readers know that I love digital photography. Until recently, I did all my image viewing and editing using Windows software.
   Last year, I switched to Apple's Macintosh, running OS X. (The "X" stands for "10," as in "Operating System 10." It's a Unix-based system very different from the software that ran older Macs, and it's now standard in every new Macintosh.)
   I've come to appreciate the many image-editing programs available for OS X, and I find some of them absolutely essential. But what I missed most on OS X was a good, fast, full-screen image viewer. Note the emphasis on "full-screen."
   After months of trying one program after another, I've found exactly what I've been looking for.
   I have a hunch that most computer users don't realize what a full-screen image viewer is. I suspect that most computer users, whether they have Windows PCs or Macintoshes, probably view images by opening them with an image editor. They go through two or three steps when they could simply double click on an image and see it immediately full-screen. This is not just a waste of time and effort; it's a waste of all that space on your expensive computer monitor. Viewing images on a small part of your screen seems just plain crazy.
   I'm puzzled each time I find that most computer users still allow their viewing software to cheat on them. Your viewer is doing you a disservice if it doesn't reduce the size of large images so they fit perfectly on the screen, without hanging invisibly off one edge or the other. And it's not doing the right thing if it doesn't automatically expand the size of small images so they fill the screen.
   That makes sense, right? This is what all good image viewers should do.
   Which is why Apple's own OS X image viewer, called Preview, misses the cut. Preview can do many things, including showing practically any kind of image (even the ones that originate on Windows PCs such as BMP files) and displaying Adobe PDF files. It can convert one kind of image file to another easily, too.
   But I think Preview is a dodo. It knows nothing about showing images full screen. You can twiddle with each picture you show to get each one as large as the screen, but you can't set up Preview so that images automatically show up full screen.
   So I tried dozens of other programs that claim to be Mac OS X image viewers. Not a single one did the right thing -- except one.
   That solitary standout turned out to be ACDSee for the Mac. The Macintosh version of ACDSee has been around quite a while, and I'd been ignoring it in hopes of finding a better full-screen viewer that had a more modern interface.
   But once I succumbed to ACDSee's power, I knew I was hooked. You might be, too. You can download a trial copy from www.acdsystems.com/English/Products/. It costs $40 if you want to keep it.
   In the software's preferences, I found a way to tell ACDSee to show all images full-screen whenever I double clicked on one. I had to made another change, too -- an easy one if you have OS X 10.2, which Apple calls the "Jaguar" version of OS X. Without running ACDSee, I used the "Get Info" command in the Finder for each kind of image and told OS X to assign ACDSee as the program that should open that kind of image. (Click once on an image and press Cmd-I for the "Get Info" dialog box.)
   You simply tell the Mac to apply the settings to all images of that type, not just to the image you selected.
   One more thing: I got into the habit of pressing Cmd-W to close the full-screen image. That keeps ACDSee running in the background, ready to show another image full-screen instantly.
   Doing these simple steps has turned my OS X Macintosh into something it should have been from the start -- a fast and flexible image-editing and image-viewing computer. If you're a Mac OS X user who's still stuck with an awkward image viewer -- as I am convinced most Mac OS X users are -- or if you haven't yet understood the benefits of viewing your digital photos in something designed especially for fast, full-screen image viewing, give ACDSee 1.6 a try. It would make an ideal gift you can give to yourself.