An image viewer or image browser is a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

that can display stored graphical

images An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

; it can often handle various

graphics file formats An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be c ...

. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as

color depth Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring to ...

display resolution The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is ...

, and

color profile In color management, an ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device, or a color space, according to standards promulgated by the International Color Consortium (ICC). Profiles describe the color attributes of a ...

. Although one may use a full-featured

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap images) such as JPEG, PNG, and GI ...

(such as

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster ...

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...

) as an image viewer, these have many editing functionalities which are not needed for just viewing images, and therefore usually start rather slowly. Also, most viewers have functionalities that editors usually lack, such as stepping through all the images in a directory (possibly as a slideshow). Image viewers give maximal flexibility to the user by providing a direct view of the directory structure available on a hard disk. Most image viewers do not provide any kind of automatic organization of pictures and therefore the burden remains on the user to create and maintain their folder structure (using tag- or folder-based methods). However, some image viewers also have features for organizing images, especially an image database, and hence can also be used as

image organizer An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organising digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications. Image organizer software is primarily focused on imp ...

. Some image viewers, such as Windows Photo Viewer that come with Windows operating systems, change a

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

image if it is rotated, resulting in loss of image quality; others offer

lossless Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistic ...

rotation.

Features

Typical features of image viewers are: * basic viewing operations such as zooming and rotation * fullscreen display *

slideshow A slide show (slideshow) is a presentation of a series of still images ( slides) on a projection screen or electronic display device, typically in a prearranged sequence. The changes may be automatic and at regular intervals or they may be manu ...

* thumbnail display * printing * screen capture * photo editor (if installed) * The ability to jump to a random file in the folder to facilitate searching. Advanced features are: * decode next image in advance and keep previous decoded image in memory for fast image changes * display (and edit)

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

such as XMP,

IPTC Information Interchange Model The Information Interchange Model (IIM) is a file structure and set of metadata attributes that can be applied to text, images and other media types. It was developed in the early 1990s by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC ...

and

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...

* batch conversion (image format, image dimensions, etc.) and renaming * create

contact sheet A contact print is a photographic image produced from film; sometimes from a film negative, and sometimes from a film positive or paper negative. In a darkroom an exposed and developed piece of film or photographic paper is placed emulsion sid ...

s * create

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

thumbnail pages * different transition effects for slideshows

Features

See also