An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. 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, and color profile. 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 or

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. Some image viewers, such as

Windows Photo Viewer Windows Photo Viewer (formerly Windows Picture and Fax Viewer) is an image viewer included with the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was first included with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 under its former name. It was temporarily r ...

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 rotation.

Features

Typical features of image viewers are: * basic viewing operations such as zooming and rotation * fullscreen display * slideshow * 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 and Exif * 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 thumbnail pages * different transition effects for slideshows

Features

See also